FAMOUS CROATS 2009 - PETAR ŠEGEDIN

PETAR ŠEGEDIN (1909 – 1998) Petar Šegedin was born on July 8, 1909 in Žrnovo, island of Korčula. He went to a training college in Dubrovnik and attended two year post-secondary school in Zagreb he enrolled and graduated at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. He was a Secretary of Matrix Croatica/Matica hrvatska (1946 – 1947) and – on two occasions – president of the Croatian Writers’ Society. From 1956 until 1960 he was the cultural attache in the Yugoslav Embassy in Paris, and after returning to Zagreb was a free lance artist. He was a regular member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts from 1964. He died in Zagreb, on September 1, 1998. He appeared in literature with fiction articles in Krleža’s Pečat in 1939 under the pen-name Petar Kružić. After the war he became a paradigmatic writer of Croatian literary existentialism, resisting a dominant concept of social realism, and was severely criticised by the bureaucrats. Already in his first novels – The Children of God (1946) and Isolationists (1947) – he created a special type of moral meditative prose preoccupied with symbols of existential situations (fear of death, anxiety, alienation, sin, guilt) and introducing strategies to overcoming uncomfortable situations. All characters in his novels represent personifications, typifying a certain quality of human behaviour: total alienation and concern in regard to how we should lead our lives. His novels are full of intellectual passion and philosophical thinking; the right expression is coined in a syntagm a philosophy of literature. Dostojevski and French existentialists were his literary models. Šegedin considered literature above all as a possibility of gaining insight into the human existence and at the same time questioning it; in the background is a process of building a plot, developing a story or creating a dramatic plot. The existentialist trilogy is complemented by a novel Crni smiješak (1969) created by rewriting of previously published short stories. It elaborates on shaping of human destiny in literary works, and describes literary writing as a therapeutic and confessional activity. In his later novels (The Garden of Gethsemane, 1981.; The Wind, 1986.; A Petrified Circle, 1988.), along with describing existential themes (suicide issues and self-destruction), he also deals with the metaphysical problems (good-evil), relations between a singled out individual and the authority, ideology and aesthetics, freedom and meaning. His literary pieces are more and more immersed into social and political context, however always bordering with philosophical essay and meditative prose. In his short novel A Traitor (Kolo, 1969, a book printed in 1993) he is preoccupied with conformism, national treason, fear, silence and blindness of Croatian intellectuals in a recent past. A Traitor is actually a herald of his famous essay We Are All Responsible? (1971) at the time of a political movement the Croatian Spring he shook up the intellectual and cultural establishment. Šegedin wrote numerous short stories and novelettes (Dead Sea, 1954; Orpheus in a Little Garden, 1964; Holy Devil, 1966; Silence, 1983; Face to Face, 1987; Bright Nights, 1993) on the opening pages interpreting anecdotal and seemingly banal situations, and as a rule portraying traumatized individuals, immersed into loneliness and sadness. A scene of action is most often a society situated in an isolated island, with characteristic silence of a rocky ground, shimmering shadows and dark anticipations. In his best novels (Holy Devil, A Day, What About a Late Pavulina…) Šegedin is exploring as a writer social issues and atmosphere. He achieved considerable literary fame with his travel pieces (On a Way, 1953; Encounters, 1962) reminiscing about culture and art, intellectual curiosity, describing inner feelings created under the impression of already experienced events, ignoring adventures and picaresque descriptions. Word for Word (1971) is a theoretical text based on logic and reasoning of autonomy of art and reciprocal conditioning of a content and a form in a performance of an aesthetic act. In most of his works Šegedin is preoccupied with a lonely and jeopardized individual, through analyses and discussions on the crises and a downfall of human values, persisting on the model of intellectual prose, which by the seriousness of themes and the quality of execution, guarantees him a high place in the Croatian contemporary literature.