A great Croatian writer is seen at his most animated and unsparing
in a venomous satire (first published in 1939) on political
aggrandizement and xenophobia. Krleza (1893-1981) was a formidably
accomplished novelist, poet, dramatist, translator, and editor
whose vast oeuvre is only sparingly represented in English (his
most highly praised novel, The Return of Philip Latinovicz, has
been translated, as has a superb story collection, The Cricket
Beneath the Waterfall). Blitva is about a fictional Baltic republic
created after WWI as a result of the enmity between Blitvan
dictator Kristian Barutanski and his former boyhood friend Niels
Nielsen ("a neurotic, European-educated intellectual"), who has
become the embarrassingly visible editor of an antigovernment
newspaper (and, the dictator suspects, a possible sympathizer with
the enemy republic of Blatvia). Though plot is secondary to the
principal characters' fulminations, Krleza does liven things up
with the killing of Barutanski's handpicked president-"elect"
during the bombing of the dictator's equestrian statue, and with a
farcical parade of advisors, factotums, and enablers variously
entrusted with the cultivation of the dictator's image. The whole
thing climaxes at a posh "banquet" disturbed by further violence,
leaving the dictator paralyzed with fury as his worst fears are
realized and the story breaks off (this translation contains only
the first two of the original's three volumes). Agenda-driven, the
novel sometimes creaks under the weight of authorial commentary,
but its very considerable satiric force is enlivened by Krleza's
crisp portrayals of Barutanski's yes-men (like the Dr. Wystulanski
entrusted with developing "poisonous gases" to help suppress
dissent). And the dictator himself, a disciple of Renaissance
polymath Giordano Bruno with the soul of a thuggish peasant, is an
altogether marvelous creation. Difficult, but much worth reading as
an introduction to an unjustly neglected European master. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Krleza's epic condemnation of hypocrisy and totalitarianism in pre
- World War II Europe; Miroslav Krleza is considered one of the
most important Central European authors of the twentieth century.
In his career as a poet, playwright, screenwriter, novelist,
essayist, journalist, and travel writer he wrote over fifty books.
He also suffered condemnation - as a leftist and a practitioner of
modernism - and saw his books proscribed in the late 1930s. The
first two books of the trilogy The Banquet in Blitva were written
in the thirties to comment on political, psychological, artistic,
and ethical issues. Such commentary had already earned him the
enmity of Yugoslavia's increasingly fascistic government. He wrote
and published the third book, together with the previous two, in
1962. Colonel Kristian Barutanski, lord of the mythical Baltic
nation of Blitva, has freed his country from foreign oppression and
now governs with an iron fist. He is opposed by Niels Nielsen, a
melancholy intellectual who hurls invective at the dictator and at
the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of society. Barutanski himself
despises the sycophants beneath him and recognizes in Nielsen a
genuine foe; yet Nielsen, haunted by his own lapses of conscience,
struggles to escape both the regime and the role of opposition
leader that is thrust upon him. In the end he flees to the
neighboring state of Blatvia - and finds his new country as corrupt
and as oppressive as the one he previously called home.
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