Irena Vrkljan

Rough draft of fourth paper due (two copies!)

Irena Vrkljan (born 1930), Yugoslavia, Germany, Croatia.

Irena Vrkljan was born in Belgrade, then capitol of Yugoslavia, but her family moved to Zagreb in 1941 and she was educated there. Her first works were lyric poems and film scenarios. In 1969 she moved to Berlin to attend the film academy there and eventually married a German citizen (about whom she writes in later volumes of her lyrical autobiography). She has lived partly in Berlin, partly in Zagreb ever since. (The Silk, the Shears and Marina will give you all these details and more.) In the mid-1980’s she began to publish a series of autobigraphical volumes; Svila, škare (The Silk, the Shears) and Marina; ili o biografiji (Marina; or about Biography) are the first two. A more recent publication,Posljednje putovanje u Beč (Last Trip to Vienna, 2000) is a noirish literary detective novel.

Course book: The Silk, the Shears, translated by Sibelan Forrester. Marina, or About Biography, translated by Celia Hawkesworth.

Questions for reading:

• What traits characterize a lyric poem, and how does a poet differ from a prose writer? Do these thoughts help you to interpret or engage with Vrkljan’s prose?
• As ever, how much do you know about the history and society she is describing, and how much does she teach you? As a young person, how do you react to her presentation of her own life at different ages? To the characters who appear in the pages only to disappear afterwards (or -— to recur later on in her life)?
• What does Vrkljan’s particular focus on women and their lives bring to her telling of her own life story?
• How and when does Vrkljan linger on a particular character in her story, and when does she arouse our sympathy? Where is her work a tribute, where is it more of an exorcism?
• What can you learn about how to be a poet from a poet who committed suicide? (Tsvetaeva, or the others.) What are the possible risks of taking a suicide as a biographical or artistic example? On the other hand, how might a poet as intense as Tsvetaeva discourage a writer whose character was more down to earth?
• What is the role of Dora?
• How does the structure of Vrkljan’s work compare to those of other autobiography or fictionalized autobiography we have read -— Kross, Kiš -— or that you have read at other times?

Works about Vrkljan:

There is a body of scholarship and critical reviews of Vrkljan’s work in Croatian and in German (since she lives partly in Germany), but not very much in English. If you like Vrkljan’s writing and would like to learn more, consult with the instructor.

World Wide Web links about Vrkljan:

http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-1076252/Irena-Vrkljan

Encyclopedia Britannica puts Vrkljan in the context of Croatian literature