4. LITERATURE
The popular perception of Gornji grad has largely been determined by the novels written at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The authors like August Šenoa and Marija Jurić Zagorka wrote historical novels whose plots are situated in Gornji grad. Since Croatia was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy until 1918, these novels also have political connotations – by emphasizing Gornji grad as a traditional home of the Croatian Parliament, and the civic, political, secular life they plug into the contemporary tendencies of resistance to the Monarchy and desire to equality. The positive characters in the novels are always honest, hard-working citizens or democratic lower nobility of Croatian origin, against the rich nobility of Hungarian and German origin.
The writer Marija Jurić-Zagorka adds to this political situation a gender component – as the first Croatian journalist, fighter for women’s rights, she gives women in her novels an active role and brings them into conflict with the hegemonic patriarchal value system. Despite their political (and in Zagorka’s case gender) subtext, both Zagorka’s and Šenoa’s novels are primarily populist, with predictable love story plots and shallow characters. Gornji grad of those novels is a romantic stage for the romantic plots seasoned with patriotic rapture. The poet Antun Gustav Matoš too sees Gornji grad as Croatian (as opposed to the foreign, modern Lower Town), intimate, gentile, and it is often his source of inspiration. Gornji grad of the time is the favorite gathering place of men of culture and intellectuals, and Matoš is a frequent guest of the promenades and of (since then vanished) Upper Town cafes – in 1978 a memorial sculpture of his was uncovered at Strossmayer’s Promenade.
After 1918, the political context had changed and Gornji grad ceases to be a frequent symbol in politically connoted literature. The writers shift their focus to Donji grad. Contemporary novel also rarely deals with Gornji grad, so the image created by the authors of the 19th century is still an active factor in the forming of the perception of Gornji grad. Besides the mentioned monument to Matoš, it is interesting to note the revalorization of Zagorka’s work in the context of postmodernism and feminist intervention into literary history which led to Zagorka’s monument in the vicinity of Gornji grad, and the walks in Zagorka’s footsteps, organized by Center for Women’s Studies, which are one of the few deliberate and meaningful tourist attractions that Gornji grad has to offer.
It is also interesting to note the novel of a crime fiction writer Pavao Pavličić, “A Crack in the Sky”, written in 1992, in which the underground tunnels of Gornji grad (i.e. military facilities used and upgraded in every political system existing in Zagreb throughout the 20th century) are a metaphor for the collective Croatian unconscious. In wartime 1992, Pavličić threads through the novel a political message of Croatians as a cursed nation, situated at the crossroad between Europe and Asia, which will always be a victim of corrupt political systems, no matter whether it be “imposed” foreign rulers or an attempt to set up an independent state.
Another contemporary Croatian literary text situated in Gornji grad is a prose poem by Hrvoje Jurić: “Jesus visiting with us”.
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A. G. MATOŠ
The modernity of Donji grad is beautiful, but what would it be without the gloaming, noble, shadowy Grič, the burgher, anti-priest bulwark, without the Croatian Weimar and Faubourg-Saint Germaine? Zagreb is not more beautiful than Belgrade because it is more orderly, cleaner, more terraced, because there are prettier houses, more trees, beautiful surroundings, but mostly because of these antique hills with the silence of wooden streets, with the physiognomy of houses and palaces in the eternal ashes of Dubrovnik, Toledo, Amiens, and other elegiac cities. If there is in us a germ of great disease, oversensitivity, the source of our incurable and uncontemporary Hamletisms is in the fatal bizarreness of that place, boring and bureaucratic in the daytime, only to shine in the moonlight with the gentility of Diogenes’ ash-gray court in Kapucinska Street, only to sound at midnight the metal measure of a dead march from the high tower of St. Mark’s and take off like a bird beneath the dreaming branches of Grič, which heard the melodies of Lisinski and saw the nobleness of Vraz’s profile.
At Home, 1905
PAVAO PAVLIČIĆ, “A CRACK IN THE SKY”
The plot of the novel begins when the main character, Nikola Krobatin, finds a book in the antique shop whose author bears the latinized version of his own name, N. Chrobatinus. In the book, which simultaneously attracts and repels him, he finds an unusual map, underneath of which there is a marking “Zagreb”, but the streets are named differently, and are at different places, which could never have existed. As the plot develops, he discovers that it is actually the map of the underground Zagreb. He finds the entrance to the tunnels and finds an unusual crack underground. He meets a girl of an indicative name, Marija Jurić, who also studies the underground city. She develops a theory that the crack is a place where Europe and Asia meet, and that the clash of energies at the gorge is responsible for the events on the surface, in Zagreb, in Croatia, and then in the whole world. Besides that, Krobatin and Marija find out that the crack had been used as a garbage dump for the political systems in Croatia: documents, evidence, even bodies had been dumped inside, all the garbage a certain system generated. All of this is tied with their personal life stories and family history. Krobatin finds out that his father had been a member of the secret police and that he personally took part in dumping of all sorts of things into it, and that Marija’s uncle was politically unsuitable and ended up in the exact same hole.
Two levels intertwine throughout the novel, micro- and macro- cosmos, the destinies of characters and the destinies of Croatia, and even broader, the political and private level where one symbolizes the other. The idea of a duality, the two poles which attract and repel each other at the same time and are meaningful only in conjunction with each other, is present in the entire novel: Krobatin has two friends who represent two types of Croatian politicians, he has two lovers, two aunts. In his and Marija’s family histories the lead roles belong to two brothers, father and uncle. The crack they find separates the world into two equal parts. The book Krobatin finds is the second volume, while Marija owns the first one, and in the novel they try to find the third volume to solve the mystery. In the end they find it, and inside they find the map of the sky that has a chartered border matching the gorge underneath Zagreb, the “crack in the sky”. When the fact that the novel is divided into ten chapters that are named after the Sun and the planets of the solar system (whose symbolic, astrological meanings are tied to the content of chapters) is added to all that, the allusion to micro- and macro- cosmos, tarot and astrology is stated literally.
excerpt from the novel:
While he watched through the window the distant green dome of the planetarium, which looked like the slightly perfected shape of the green domes of tree tops that surrounded it, Krobatin thought of an unusual idea. Maybe the map does not influence people strangely because it is far away from every reality, but because it is very close to it? Because the aunts have, naturally, had to realize right away that the map does not coincide with the real state of things, they didn’t need a modern map of Zagreb for that, because they had been born and grew up in Gornji grad. They have surely noticed immediately that the streets in the map do not exist in reality, and that there exist no names that the streets in the map bear. But maybe those streets and those names are something that actually exists, only not in reality, but in the souls of the inhabitants of this city? Maybe, to put it simply, the map shows a subconscious image of Zagreb, an image that every one of us carries inside, but hides from himself, so it becomes disturbing and embarrassing when it appears in reality, as dark secrets of the unconscious often do?