Vesna Parun in the context of socialist realism: case analysis

Abstract

This paper attempts to present the literary activity of Vesna Parun during the period of socialist realism, thereby emphasising the reception of her poetry in the critical-political discourse of that period, which functioned as the interpreter and promoter of the communist-party politics. The paper indirectly demonstrates that Vesna Parun’s artistic subjectivation was rendered rather impossible due to the political regime which demanded identification with the logos of the system by imposing its own cultural pattern. Socialist realism, being incapable and unwilling to accept difference and otherness, has thus revealed that its essence is in fact completely opposite to the original idea of the left, while the autonomy and artistic freedom, i.e. its identification with and adjustment to desirable values, have become questionable. Although today it is often stressed out that the period of socialist realism was marked by a restrictive atmosphere and that this dominant paradigm did not succeed in having a considerable influence on the development of Croatian literature, Vesna Parun is the best example of how the public critical discourse, which played a key role in the propaganda of the new artistic preoccupations without having consideration for individual expressions, measured the value of a piece of art based on agitation-propaganda success and could not even recognize an evident concretization of her verses on the horizon of contemporary reality.