Vladimir Nazor

This article is about Croatian poet. For the ferry, see MF Vladimir Nazor.
Vladimir Nazor
President of the ZAVNOH[a]
In office
3 June 1943 – 21 July 1945
Preceded by Office established
Succeeded by Himself (as Speaker of Parliament)
1st Speaker of the Croatian Parliament
In office
21 July 1945 – 26 February 1946
Prime Minister Pavle Gregorić
(as Minister for Croatia)
Vladimir Bakarić
Preceded by Himself (as President of the ZAVNOH)
Succeeded by Zlatan Sremec
1st President of the Presidium of the Croatian Parliament[b]
In office
26 February 1946 – 19 June 1949
Prime Minister Vladimir Bakarić
Preceded by Himself (as Speaker of Parliament)
Succeeded by Karlo-Gašpar Mrazović
Personal details
Born (1876-05-30)30 May 1876
Postira (Brač), Dalmatia, Austria-Hungary
Died 19 June 1949(1949-06-19) (aged 73)
Zagreb, Croatia, Yugoslavia
Nationality Croat
Political party Unitary National Liberation Front (1942–45)
National Front (1945–49)
Alma mater University of Zagreb
University of Graz
^a The President of the ZAVNOH (the wartime deliberative council) formally held the position of head of state.
^b The President of the Presidium of the Parliament was the office of the head of state, the Speaker of Parliament was a separate office.

Vladimir Nazor (30 May 1876 – 19 June 1949) was a Croatian poet and politician who served as the first President of the Presidium of the Croatian Parliament (Croatian head of state), and first Speaker of the Croatian Parliament.

Nazor began his political career as the head of the State Anti-fascist Council for the National Liberation of Croatia (ZAVNOH), the provisional Croatian World War II deliberative assembly, moving on to head the first post-war Croatian National Parliament (Narodni Sabor). In that post, he was by law concurrently the first (non-monarchical) head of state of Croatia in general, and the first head of state of the current Croatian republic. His position carried little real political power, which was instead invested in the office of the Prime Minister and (informally) with the Secretary of the Communist Party of Croatia.

Nazor is however most remembered as a well-known poet, writer, translator, and humanist. Although he was not an active politician until 1941, he had a significant political influence through ethical aspects of his work during prewar Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Early career

Nazor's early work paralleled the rise of the Young Croatian literary movement. He acquired much literary popularity in Croatia writing about folk legends and stories. The tale Big Joseph (Veli Jože) (1908) is still popular: it features a helpful and kind hearted giant named Jože, living in the area around the town of Motovun (Inner Istria). His verses in Hrvatski kraljevi (Croatian Kings) (1912) established him as the great patriot poet in Croatia. Istrian Tales (Istarske priče) (1913) revealed his storytelling skill and mastery. By illuminating the personality of the South Slavs through tales of Croatia, he contributed a great deal in creating the Yugoslav national consciousness.

Nazor supported the opposition alliance led by Vladko Maček in the 1938 Yugoslav elections.[1] During World War II, on 30 December 1941, Nazor became a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts by government decree,[2] but in 1942 he escaped from Zagreb with poet Ivan Goran Kovačić in a boat across the river Kupa, that was sublimed in poem The Boat on the Kupa (Čamac na Kupi) and joined the Partisans. Nazor became one of Josip Broz Tito's closest associates and the President of Croatia's World War II assembly, the ZAVNOH. After the war, he became the first president of the People's Republic of Croatia's Parliament (President of the Presidium of the People's Assembly), and thus the first head-of-state of the modern Croatian state in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. He went on to write a war diary With Partisans (S partizanima) (1943–1945).

As a poet

Nazor was a very productive author. He was the master of prose, but his highest achievements are in lyric poetry. One of his main prose works is the extensive novel Loda the Shepherd (Pastir Loda) (1938). The work describes the history of his native island of Brač as told by Loda, a faun, one of the last of that kind on the island.

In poetry Nazor's creative way began from metaphysical transcendental philosophy and arrived to materialistic revolutionary action, to rational scheme and harmonic larpourlartistic crystal structure and interior protest against artistic verbalizing in Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism and Surrealism as well as instructive didactics of socialist realism. Therefore, his opus comprises a plenty of style tendencies, from neoclassical to surrealistic and despite its heterogeneity, in essence it belongs to Symbolism. Nazor's poems are rather difficult for reading, due to subjecting contents to form – especially in sonets, rhime and rhythm forcing, vowels shortening for adjusting the number of syllables and progressing the sentence to the next verse as well as use of academic, atypical, rare and arhaic words.

Nazor wrote over 500 poems. His poetry implicates that art is aesthetically stronger than reality, for art reflects the essence of real world. Early phase of Nazor's poetry work is mostly object of scholars' research now, but Galérien's Poeme (Galiotova pesan) from that time (1903), describing suffering and sadness of a galley slave, attains universal meanining as condemnation of oppressing at all and still stands as one of the most expressive disapproval of slavery.

Nazor probably reached the highest scope in poems of so-called pagan phase, published in books of verse Lyrics (Lirika) (1910) and New Poems (Nove pjesme) (1913). Passionately ecstatic, these poems comprise symbols of life, its eternal fertility, pantheistic metamorphoses of nature and sensual affirmation of love; life prevails for life itself, so life is taken in its whole versatility. Vitalistic view of life and fascination by countryside – Cypress (Čempres), Dionysian Poems (Dionizijske pjesme), Cicada (Cvrčak) and Olive (Maslina), as well as contemplative experience and spiritualizing of natural appearances – Turris eburnea, Notturno, Forest Sleeps (Šuma spava), Trunk (Stablo) and Spider (Pauk), dominate in the heights of that phase, and these are the heights of Nazor's poetry at all. Poems Cicada, Olive, Notturno and Forest Sleeps belong to the top of the World poetry.

Vladimir Nazor spoke several languages and translated from Italian (Dante – Divina Commedia, Giosuè Carducci, Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele d'Annunzio), German (Goethe, Heine), French (Hugo, Alfred de Musset) and English (Shakespeare).

Nazor was buried in Mirogoj Cemetery.[3] Since 1959, Croatia has named a state award for artistic achievement the Vladimir Nazor Award. In 2008, a total of 306 streets in Croatia were named after Nazor, making him the second most common person eponym of streets in the country.[4]

Works

His works have been translated into following languages (incomplete list):

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Vladimir Nazor.
  1. ↑ Vladimir Nazor, Croatian Radiotelevision
  2. ↑ Tko je tko u NDH, "Vladimir Nazor". Minerva. Zagreb, 1997
  3. ↑ Vladimir Nazor at Gradska Groblje
  4. ↑ Letica, Slaven (29 November 2008). Bach, Nenad, ed. "If Streets Could Talk. Kad bi ulice imale dar govora.". Croatian World Network. ISSN 1847-3911. Retrieved 2014-12-31.
Political offices
New title President of the ZAVNOH
1943–1945 		Succeeded by
Himself
as Speaker of Parliament
Preceded by
Himself
as President of the ZAVNOH		 Speaker of the Croatian Parliament
1945–1946 		Succeeded by
Zlatan Sremec
Preceded by
Himself
as Speaker of Parliament		 President of the Presidium of the Croatian Parliament
1946–1949 		Succeeded by
Karlo-Gašpar Mrazović
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