Author:
Tin Lemac
Email:
tinlemac01@gmail.com
Summary
Marija Čudina’s poetry represents one of famous, but not well known projects on the recent
Croatian poetry scene. Her beginnings are related to the poetic horizon of the literary journals
Circles and Reason and the poetry by other authors reveals her growth in the manner of her selfconsistency.
The reason for her nonbelonging to the generation modes is partially related to her
private life in Belgrade after she married Leonid Šejka and some antipoetic suggestions which she
has presented in her book Wild soul (Čudina 1986). Her first book Imaginary girls (Čudina 1959)
was well received by the critics, and some of them (such as Cvjetko Milanja) assume that this
book is one of her most powerful books from the poetic point of view. Her poetry is described in
terms of existentialism, melancholy and Gnosticism. Some of her works are existentialist
(explicated in the manner of Cioran, Beckett, Camus, as Milanja explained). Melancholy is the
main characteristic of the already mentioned Wild soul (Sanjin Sorel has explained this in one of
his papers). Some critics (e.g. Danilo Kiš) explain the world in her poetry by using Gnosticism. In
this paper we deal with the critical reception of Marija Čudina’s poetry which was published
during the second half of the 20th and the first years of the 21st century. Following of the current
production of this poetic project and the formation of its poetics have resulted in many insights
which are here systematized so that we can analyse their interpretative validity. With critical
distance and focusing on these issues, we analyse her poetic and stylistic description at a moment
when this project is rounded and we suggest interpretative directions in which the future critical
systematizations should go. We take a positivist approach to these critical texts and detect their
basic values, evaluate their range and compare them with other individual or synthetic texts on
Čudina’s poetry in order to legitimise their validity.
Key words
Marija Čudina’s poetry; critical reception; poetics and the stylistic model;
interpretative perspective
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