Bene, Sándor (2017) Szirének a térképen: Zrínyi Miklós, Zrínyi Péter és az irodalomtörténet földrajza. In: Határok fölött: Tanulmányok a költő, katona, államférfi Zrínyi Miklósról. MTA Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, Budapest, pp. 37-78. ISBN 978-963-416-071-7
|
Text
Terkepek_2017.pdf - Published Version Download (2MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Research on the poetic oeuvre and political career of Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664) and Péter Zrínyi (1621–1671) has been underway ever since the modern nation building efforts began in Central Europe. Thus, Hungarian and Croatian scholars have been equally interested in the figures of the two brothers, Miklós and Péter Zrínyi. Eventually, Péter Zrínyi came to be central in Croatian grand narratives, while Miklós emerged as the protagonist of Hungarian national political, cultural historical, and literary canons. Their political program, which included the liberation of the Southern Slav regions from the reign of the Ottomans and the federative reform of the Kingdom of Hungary, has been forgotten, as has their bilingual literary program, which was to strengthen their ideological vision of the symbiosis of Croatian and Hungarian nobility from the perspective of culture. Over the course of the past two decades, research in the field of historiography, military history, and cultural history brought about a shift in interpretations, increasingly revealing how the dimensions of this long-forgotten national program could extend over national boundaries and how it is linked to the rest of Europe. In this article, I investigate the bilingual literary program of the Zrínyi brothers in light of this paradigm. An exceptional document of the program (even in European terms) is the Hungarian-language (Vienna, 1651) and Croatian-language (Venice, 1660) publication of the volume containing the baroque epic narrating the siege of Szigetvár (1566) and a list of related lyrical poems. In the first section of my article, I summarize the findings of research on the history of interpretations of Miklós Zrínyi’s poetry. The stories entitled Siren of the Adriatic Sea portray the competition between two of the most decisive trends in modernization and conclude that Zrínyi creates a synthesis of Tasso’s late theologizing poetics and the sensualist poetics of the school of Marinism within the framework of a new heroic stoicism. From a comparative perspective, the Hungarian Syrena-volume, which had hardly any antecedents in Hungarian literature and had evolved from European poetic traditions, typologically fits in among the Croatian reception of Tasso and Marino. Accordingly, it materializes as something entirely left out of this reception: a transcendent, non-Aristotelian poetry that synthesizes lyrical and epic poetry, the modernity of which points to that of Calderón, Bacon, and Milton. What is missing from the Dalmatian literature of Croatia is heroic epic poetry (following in the footsteps of Tasso’s late Gerusalemme conquistata) represented by Zrínyi’s The Siege of Sziget. Dubrovnik poet Ivan Gundulić’s heroic poem about the Turks (Osman, 1638) uses political components of Tasso’s early epic (Gerusalemme liberata) in a way that suggests a roman á clef, while the romantic layer of Liberata and the legacy of pastorale live on in the dramatic literature of Dubrovnik, a literature that is also particularly responsive to Marino’s sensual lyric poetry. Having some knowledge of this Croatian tradition, Miklós Zrínyi took an alternative route in his continuation of this common literary heritage (Petrarca, Tasso), but for quite a while he had no followers whatsoever. Péter Zrínyi’s less successful Croatian translation (Adrianszkoga mora Sirena) could not convey his brother’s distinctive answer to the dilemma of achieving a dynamic balance between lyrical poetry and drama. For contemporary Croatian and later South Slav literary history, the poetic message of the Hungarian Syrena was unrecognizable. Traditional interpretations could only place Péter Zrínyi’s oeuvre first in an ideological paradigm and then in a linguistic historical paradigm with an ideological base. According to such interpretations, his oeuvre is perceived as heralding a narrowing gap between northern and southern Croatian culture, as well as a standardization in Croatian politics and the Southern Slav languages (along with his wife, Katarina Zrinska, and his brother-in-law, Fran Krsto Frankopan, Péter Zrínyi was member of the so-called “literary circle of Ozaly;” they made efforts to achieve a fusion of the three major Southern Slav dialects, thereby foreshadowing the mission of the 19th-century Illyrian movement). In the final section of this article, I offer support for my hypothesis according to which the literary and scholarly reception is hardly surprising, and it is not the result of some arbitrary misinterpretation. Péter Zrínyi himself swerved away from his brother’s objectives when, in the mid-1650s (presumably influenced by the work of Gundulić), he resumed translating The Siege of Sziget, this time bringing its versification and worldview closer to Dalmatian Croatian literary norms. As opposed to his brother, who strove to poeticize politics, Péter Zrínyi made poetics political. In the 1660s, the research into Croatian genealogy (which he financed), the literary works dedicated to him, and the map of Illyria (Illyricum hodiernum, 1666), which was produced on order from Rome and likewise dedicated to him, indicate that, unlike his brother, Péter did not participate in the federative reform of the Kingdom of Hungary, but wished to locate his own literary oeuvre on the imaginary map of a future Southern Slav (Illyrian) state.
Actions (login required)
Edit Item |