On meeting James Joyce for the first time, writer and artist, George Russell, recognised his “keen and cold intelligence,” but told the young man, that he had “not enough chaos in [him] to make a world.” Luckily for Joyce, who passed away in 1941, 75 years ago this month, there was plenty of chaos in […]
There is a type of thought that cannot be expressed linearly. It demands a detour through analogy and a form that speaks for itself before we even utter a word. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is precisely such a thought — a book that is simultaneously the object and the very interpretation of consciousness and time. It […]
Kris Kelvin and the Immature God of Solaris In the novel Solaris, Stanisław Lem shapes one of the most striking literary experiments regarding the limits of human knowledge and the nature of encountering the “radically other.” Kris Kelvin, a scientist and psychologist, arrives at the station above the planet Solaris with the task of investigating […]
Kafka’s Dimension of Critique. The authors in the text emphasize the critical dimensions of Kafka’s oeuvre, directing attention to the deconstruction of bourgeois subjectivity, the structure of institutions of the modern state, the questioning of modern distinctions between private and public space, work and free time, and other socio-political phenomena. In line with more complex […]
Thomas Mann – Death in Venice: The Path to the Abyss. “Death in Venice” is not merely a novella about decadence and longing, but a profound philosophical study of the conflict between Apollonian moderation and Dionysian chaos. Through the fate of Gustav von Aschenbach, Mann explores the boundaries of artistic creation, the nature of beauty, […]
Crnjanski’s A Novel of London. My desire to read this novel was sparked after a friend, Velibor Petković, cited it as one of the ten most significant novels in our language. I realized I hadn’t read Crnjanski in a long time; I barely remembered Migrations, and from The Journal of Čarnojević, I mainly recalled the […]
Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a major Norwegian writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun’s work spans more than seventy years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and environment. He published more than twenty novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, and some […]
I decided to kill. Perhaps it is better say I have always known that. When I was a little boy I always wanted to kill my teacher of music. I wanted that not because I hated her or because I had a bad mark from that subject, on the contrary, I loved her and […]