FAMOUS CROATS 2012 - DRAGOJLA JARNEVIĆ

DRAGOJLA JARNEVIĆ (1812 – 1875) Dragojla Jarnević is one of the most prominent characters of Croatian literature and culture in the 19th century and in general. That negative Cvijeta Zuzorić, unshaped into beauty by male verses and not left by last will to coming generations as incarnation of male dreams, has left - on the contrary - her own picture of male world seen through the fragile and hard glass of her own life. Famous Croatian poets and politicians of her time, like Gaj, or her first mentor Trnski, got in her handwriting written unconventional supplements to their mythologized portraits while her whole life passed under the motto: I do not know what subservience is. It is clear that such a life is lived at a high cost and Dragojla Jarnević never receded from paying it. There exists in Croatian art one framework into which Dragojla Jarnević only accidentally did not enter. That is the Panopticum croaticum of the sculptor Vanja Radauš. By suggestive metaphors Radauš compressed the lives of our famous creators/authors, to mention just Slava Raškaj or Vjekoslav Karas: her chicken legs or wings of insane bird and his destiny in the form of fish that swallows the drowned person, a self-murderer. Much of that which was born great, ended choked: especially if the word was about women – from whom the unsurpassed example is Ivana Brlić Mažuranić. Struggle against narrow frame, against destiny that engulfs, makes Dragojla Jarnević an ideal protagonist of the cycle Panopticum croaticum. She, however, endured her life till the end. She was born in Karlovac, in a poor family, where she received neither sufficient love nor education. She attended primary school and after the age of thirteen she was self-educated. Striving toward wider and better prospects, she went to foreign countries; in Graz she learned sartorial craft, by which she later made her living; in Venice she served as companion and educator in patrician families. In 1840 she finally returned to Karlovac. For some time she managed a private school. She began to write, first in German and then in Croatian: patriotic poems, three today lost dramas, a novel Dva pira (a serial novel published in „Domobran“ ). She was an ardent participant of the Croatian revival, an Illyrian recognised also among the men / leaders of the movement. Though, without the possibility of social and personal emotional fulfilment, of problematic health, she led a hard life that remained for us fixed as a monument to the struggle for the rights of a half of humankind: a life transformed into diary which Dragojla Jarnević wrote from1832 till her death (in order to find relief from her poverty and give her life a kind of permanent purpose). A bright insight in history, and above all an unbribable introspection mark he text of the diary also then it reflects on most intimate situations and events. Today, when thee is no sensation left, the erotic dimension of that life is still almost bruising - from the needs of the body that can be satisfied only beyond conventions of age and class , to the needs of soul that erotise friendships with monks. Dairy is an exceptional literary work in which reality eliminates trivial templates of time and introspection sublimes the roughness of realism: for, in the work of Dragojla Jarnević art and life are unity. Dragojla Jarnević, let it be said in the end, is the woman pioneer in Croatian alpinism and hiking. She climbed thus the south cliff of Okić, taking the ascent that today bears her name. We mentioned it because of the irresistible metaphorics of the context. Ascend higher; see farther; climb with difficulties; be stronger than herself. In the meantime, Dragojla Jarnević received a number of valuable interpretations, she even got several monuments. And, had she not acquired anything, that steep ascent would remain her most appropriate monument in Croatian landscape.
                                                Željka Čorak