FAMOUS CROATS 2010 - JANKO POLIĆ KAMOV

JANKO POLIĆ KAMOV By his flashy passage through the expanses of Croatian literature, by his daring testing of hardly dreamt potential of his mother tongue and even more daring questioning of almost all national customs, practices, manners, heritage and values, Janko Polić has turned an essentially new page in Croatian literature creating a radically modern sensibility. Having taken a pseudonym Kamov, after a biblical character who questions his father’s authority and mocks at it, he himself has stressed in a programmatic way his own rebellious attitude, and after having tried himself in this revolutionary way in all most important literary forms (poems, short stories, novel, drama and feuilleton) he gave to our literature an authentic avant-garde dimension worthy of great European protagonists. We should not forget that all his work was written in a sort of creative fever, during only three or four years of his activity, which amplitude ended in the first decade of the 20th century (parallel to universal appearance of cubism and expressionism, mostly before the appearance of the well known Futurist Manifesto). Janko Polić was born in Sušak, Rijeka, on 17 November 1886. Thrown out of the Gymnasium in Sušak, he continues his schooling in Senj, where he is also thrown out of the boarding school. In 1902 his family moves to Zagreb where Janko gives up all intentions to acquire official education, but individually shapes himself by frenetically reading (books from his father’s good library). His relentless spirit leads him among the rioters against Khuen Hedervary, and results in three month’s imprisonment in 1903. Already in 1904 he joins a travelling theatrical company, visiting many counties. By the help of his family, and financing himself partly from the co-operation with newspapers, from 1907 he often visits various Italian towns where he becomes familiar with current cultural and artistic tendencies, and intuitively and prophetically reacts to the disintegration of traditional models and the announcement of different, innovative ethic and aesthetic ideals. Helped by his brother Vladimir, in 1907 he publishes his only works within covers, two collections of poems ("The Curse" and "Pinched Paper “) and two plays (“The Tragedy of Brains“and “On Native Soil“). In 1910 he starts his journey through Genoa and Marseilles to Barcelona, which attracts him by social unrests and strong anarchist movement; however, in this Catalan town, after a very short stay, he dies on 8 August. Apart from the mentioned works, printed by the author himself, Kamov published in newspapers and magazines a number of short stories and travel diaries, and left several plays in handwriting and – most important – a novel „Dried -Out Mire“ (written between 1906 and 1909). Rebellious and uncompromising writer, during his life mainly badly received (severely criticised by Matoš), but after his death given a justified satisfaction, especially when his plays started to be put on scene and his epochal novel was printed with a half a century delay (in the collection of his works, Rijeka, 1956–58). For his experience of absurdity and grotesque, anxiety and chaos and his expressive registers of the reflectiveness of a burlesque, inner monologue and polemic dialogue Janko Polić Kamov is still today among the authors of undoubted actuality and format, transcending the narrow national limits. Tonko Maroević