Table Of ContentCYCLOPS
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CYCLOPS
RANKO MARINKOVIC´
TRANSLATED BY VLADA STOJILJKOVIC´
EDITED BY ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC´
E
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON
A MARGELLOS
WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS BOOK
The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works
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Copyright ∫ 2010 Estate of Ranko Marinkovic´. Originally published in Croatian
by Prosveta, Beograd, 1965, former Yugoslavia. All rights reserved. This book may
not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marinkovic´, Ranko, 1913–2001
[Kiklop. English]
Cyclops / Ranko Marinkovic´, ; translated by Vlada Stojiljkovic´ ;
edited by Ellen Elias-Bursac´.
p. cm. — (A Margellos world republic of letters book)
Originally published in Serbo-Croatian as: Kiklop.
isbn 978-0-300-15241-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. World War, 1939–1945—Yugoslavia—Fiction. 2. Zagreb (Croatia)—Fiction.
I. Stojiljkovic´, Vlada, 1938– II. Elias-Bursac´, Ellen. III. Title.
pg1618.m28k513 2010
891.8%235—dc22
2010024516
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of
Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
INTRODUCTION
Making his way through a crowded Zagreb square one evening
on the eve of World War II, Melkior Tresic´ catches sight of a priest
with familiar, jutting ears. The priest, we learn, had taught him
catechism during his childhood in Dalmatia. The fleeting glimpse
of the Dalmatian priest in the opening pages of this quintessentially
Zagreb novel is Ranko Marinkovic´’s nod to his native Dalmatia.
The nod tells us that Melkior Tresic´ is an outside insider, some-
one who, like Marinkovic´, came to the city as a student, and who
sees Zagreb as someone born there never could. Marinkovic´ cap-
tures Zagreb’s crowds, the shysters, the army barracks, and the seedy
neighborhoods in one of the most famous fictional portraits of the
city, yet he peoples the novel with a closely knit group whose playful
jibes and cheerful ignorance of the portentous events taking shape
around them have a certain resonance with the insular Mediterra-
nean culture in which he was raised.
When Marinkovic´ set out to write CYCLOPS in the early 1960s
he was thinking big. In shaping his plot he reached for the big
writers, such as Joyce (whose Ulysses had first been translated into
Croatian in 1957), Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky. For all
the influence of other literatures, however, the novel is anchored
firmly in a more local context. The story unfolds on the streets
between the Zagreb main square and the Opera House, and the
streets and cafés are inhabited by the poets, actors, and other public
figures of Marinkovic´’s student years in Zagreb. Along with the
v
readily identifiable references to Hamlet and Leopold Bloom, the
narrative and dialogue are interwoven with allusions to various Cro-
atian writers and their characters and to verses of Croatian poets—all
unfamiliar to American readers, including Ivan Gundulic´,∞ Ivan
Brlic´-Mazˇuranic´,≤ a character of Krlezˇa’s,≥ and lines of verse by
Vladimir Nazor,∂ Vladimir Vidric´,∑ Ivo Vojnovic´,∏ and Tin Ujevic´,π
—as well as mentions of equally unfamiliar Serbian writers such as
Simo Pandurovic´∫ and Jovan Ducˇic´.Ω The panorama of Zagreb life
in the opening pages of the novel, the MAAR street advertisements,
the vendors selling shoelaces, are authentic images of Zagreb life of
the late thirties, and Jutarnji List (Morning News) is still hawked by
vendors on Zagreb’s streets.
There are many comparisons that can be drawn between CY-
CLOPS and other works of literature, most obviously Ulysses, the
Odyssey, and Hamlet. But the irreverence, irony, and satire with
which Marinkovic´ dissects Zagreb cultural life on the eve of World
War II also resonate with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). Heller’s
biography affords a surprisingly productive comparison with Marin-
kovic´’s. They both were playwrights and short-story writers, as well
as novelists, and they were close in age. Heller fought in active
combat in World War II, unlike Marinkovic´, who spent the war as
an internee and refugee, but both of them were the first, for their
respective readerships, to write of World War II in a darkly hu-
morous vein. And they were each known chiefly for their first novel,
each of which became a huge best seller, never to be outshone by
anything else they later wrote.
The year CYCLOPS was published (1965) was pivotal for post-
war Yugoslavia. It followed on a period of furious economic growth
during the late 1950s and a repressive spell that came after Yugo-
slavia’s break with Cominform in 1948. There were major economic
reforms in 1965, and the next year saw the dismissal of the Minis-
ter of the Interior, Aleksandar Rankovic´, over a wiretapping scan-
dal, which became the symbolic end of the immediate postwar
period. The Yugoslav government began allowing its citizens to
travel abroad freely in 1966, thereby setting itself apart from the
vi
Eastern European countries that were still ‘‘behind the iron cur-
tain,’’ and these political and economic reforms were accompanied
by a thaw in culture. After a brief spell of socialist realism in the early
fifties, the literatures in Yugoslavia had asserted a modicum of artis-
tic independence, but only within limits (there could be no men-
tion of the Goli Otok and other prison camps, or articulation of
nationalist and separatist sentiments, or scurrilous mention of the
person of Josip Broz Tito). The limits relaxed somewhat in the
1960s, which was a decade for ferment in all the arts.
Marinkovic´’s CYCLOPS, published in the midst of all this, and
Death and the Dervish, by Mesˇa Selimovic´, which appeared a year
later, were groundbreaking novels that brought new intellectual
depth to the treatment of controversial issues, such as, in CY-
CLOPS, the use of irony and satire in the treatment of the recent
war, and, in Death and the Dervish the nature of repressive author-
ity. As soon as it appeared, CYCLOPS was showered with accolades,
including the NIN award—the most prestigious recognition for liter-
ary works in the former Yugoslavia,∞≠ and the same happened with
Death and the Dervish the following year.
To say that Marinkovic´ raised eyebrows with his ironic treatment
of the war theme in CYCLOPS is not to suggest that there had been
no antiwar Croatian prose before him. Miroslav Krlezˇa, in particu-
lar, is famous for his antiwar stories after World War I. Where Mar-
inkovic´ broke new ground was in his use of irony and satirical
humor to transgress the various strictures imposed by the victorious
Partisans on how the conflict would be described in the years follow-
ing the war. But it was precisely the madcap brand of humor, the sly
nicknames used by the denizens of Zagreb’s cafés, the fantastical
tales of shipwrecked sailors confronted by cannibalistic natives in
the South Pacific, the ingenuity with which Melkior Tresic´ keeps
himself out of combat, that gave the novel its irresistible charm and
steered it through the sensitive political waters of the day.
Marinkovic´ studied psychology at Zagreb University in the 1930s.
He was intrigued by the psychology of the artist and was drawn,
in particular, to Tin Ujevic´’s verse and the workings of the poet’s
vii
psyche. While still a student, he published three brief articles∞∞
on Ujevic´,∞≤ in which he remarks on ‘‘something mysterious, spe-
cial and remarkable, almost unintelligible’’ in Ujevic´’s personality.∞≥
Marinkovic´ credits Dostoyevsky with having a formative influence
on Ujevic´’s preoccupation with suffering, humiliation, and pain.
He wonders whether Ujevic´’s bohemian eccentricity is a form of
mental illness, and concludes that with an ear for the right reso-
nance one could enter into this complex, chaotic psychology. Mar-
inkovic´ also describes the way Ujevic´ represents love and the femi-
nine in his verse, saying that Ujevic´ is a poet of ‘‘spiritual love, the
erotic turned mystical, stripped of its sexuality, love that is felt with a
sixth sense, like music,’’∞∂ a poet who perceives woman as a symbol
of ‘‘creative mystery.’’∞∑ Marinkovic´ and Ujevic´ got to know each
other later, and there are several Zagreb anecdotes stemming from
their relationship, particularly that Marinkovic´ dubbed Ujevic´ the
Baudelaire from Vrgorec, while Ujevic´’s nickname for Marinkovic´
was the Voltaire from Vis (each man’s respective birthplace).
Only a few chapters in CYCLOPS feature the Ujevic´-like charac-
ter Maestro, but Maestro’s spirit and his relationship with Tresic´ per-
meate the entire novel. For all his curmudgeonly manner, Maestro
has an abiding fondness for Tresic´, and chooses him as the only
person from their circle he can trust. Theirs is the principle emo-
tional relationship of CYCLOPS. Another vestige of Ujevic´’s is the
mystique attached to the name ‘‘Viviana,’’ which personifies the
feminine ‘‘creative mystery’’ in Ujevic´’s poetic.
In the immediate postwar years Marinkovic´ was one of the rising
stars in Zagreb cultural life, active in the theater and in publishing
and teaching, while in the same period Ujevic´ was working only as a
literary translator, having been banned for five years by the Writers’
Association from publishing his own poetry and essays—punish-
ment for accepting employment from the fascist regime as a transla-
tor during the war. Marinkovic´ was among those who saw to it that
Ujevic´ always had enough translation work to support him during
this time. Harold Bloom alerts us to the dynamic that often shapes
relations between younger generations of writers and the powerful
viii
figures of previous generations. Ranko Marinkovic´ was not a poet,
so he was not competing directly with Ujevic´’s looming influence,
but this dynamic is also worth keeping in mind when parsing his
portrait of Ujevic´ in the character of Maestro.
Marinkovic´ is frequently hailed for his irony and the psychologi-
cal and social analysis he brings to his stories, novels, and plays, but,
as several recent critics have remarked, there is room for more
scholarship on his work. As one scholar comments, ‘‘CYCLOPS,
the novel by Ranko Marinkovic´ published in 1965, is regularly ac-
corded a distinguished place in critical and historical surveys of
Croatian literary modernism, but this claim is supported by a some-
what tautological argumentation. Namely, instead of insisting on
the stylistic excellence of Marinkovic´’s writing and the vivid elabora-
tion of the characters, Croatian criticism hardly ever moves beyond
discussing the plot.’’∞∏
On the other hand, a critic notes, ‘‘CYCLOPS will continue to
be read for pure pleasure for a long time to come . . . It is a great
urban novel. Academic critics, in speaking of CYCLOPS, insist on
the theme of fear and other things which are certainly relevant, but
which sidestep the ‘details’ that make even high school students
enjoy this novel . . . CYCLOPS will survive because it takes place on
the street and in the smoke of cafés, because it is promiscuous, witty
and full of fools.’’∞π
A new generation of scholars is rediscovering Marinkovic´’s writ-
ing, bringing the precepts of literary theory to bear on his themes,
characters, and structures in a variety of productive and engaging
ways. Aside from the two articles cited here, there is very little criti-
cal writing available in English on Marinkovic´’s work. The entry in
the Dictionary of Literary Biography is a valuable general overview
of his opus.
Aside from delighting generations of high school students, Ranko
Marinkovic´ and CYCLOPS have entered into the cultural parlance
with a television series and a 1982 film based on the novel CY-
CLOPS (directed by Antun Vrdoljak), and Kiklop [CYCLOPS] is
ix
