Ervin and the Madmen - FSK - forum slovanskih kultur

Ervin and the Madmen

Ervin i luđaci

Croatia

Dalibor Cvitan

Svete smeti – ta nalepka mu je bila všeč, ker se je z dna gnusa do deponije, v katero se je zakopal do vratu, včasih popolnoma nepričakovano prebil svetel žarek, občutek silnega zadovoljstva s popolno celovitostjo njegove nesreče.

The novels The Second-Hand Man and Ervin and the Madmen form a semantic and structural whole. This “black duology” is entirely devoted to the analysis of “negative existence.” At its center stands a man on the threshold of his fifties who has “grown tired of being human,” tired of living by the standards of others, and who feverishly seeks his own authentic “difference” in a world where all possibilities are predetermined. Cvitan’s rebellious, cynical, and (self-)destructive protagonist, Ervin Lakošta, discovers this existential space of difference in his own despair, in futility, and in a conscious rejection of social norms. His uncompromising sense of unhappiness, sadness, and dissatisfaction—his radiating negative energy—gradually rises throughout the novel to the level of a carefully constructed poetics of living.

Dalibor Cvitan (1934 - 1994) was an editor of several literary magazines and journals (Telegram, Žena, Umjetnost i dijete, Kritika, Republika, Termin), and compiled an anthology of Croatian poetry for children. His poetic works (The Last Bather, Apò thaláttes, The Lights of the Necropolis) reveal a tension between tradition and modernity, abstraction and meditation, the primitive and the refined, as well as a creative use of historical poetic rhetoric. In his essays (The Ironic Narcissus, The Right to Misfortune, Appalled by Evil, Demos and Demon), he applies the analytical approaches of American New Critics and archetypal critics, addressing the problem of reality as endangered objectivity. His novelistic output is small (The Second-Hand Man, Half-Time, Ervin and the Madmen), but important, as it opposes dominant literary trends (such as jeans prose, fantasy, and genre fiction) and represents a kind of existentialist resurgence in Croatian literature. He also published a collection of plays for theatre, radio, and television (Test Results) and translated from English.