Biographism in the literary-historical and lexicographic method of Branko Vodnik

Abstract

In this paper, we try to shed light on the biographical component in Branko Vodnikʼs oeuvre, with an emphasis on metabiographical and methodological manifestations in his literary-historical and critical articles and in the articles in the Serbian-Croatian-Slovenian National Encyclopedia. In order to have a more complete insight into Vodnikʼs lexicographic work, the lexicographic material in Vodnikʼs manuscript legacy was consulted and described. The aim of the paper is threefold: to shed light on Vodnikʼs lesser-known observations on the method of literary history work, to connect his theses in his studies with the interpretations he presented in his encyclopedia articles, and to describe the controversies in literary history that were directly manifested in Vodnikʼs work and in his professional career. As a prominent literary historian of Croatian modernity, recognised as a methodological innovator and reformer, he was incorrectly presented as the first Croatian literary historian to apply a scientific method, but also criticised from non-literary standpoints, as a literary expert whose evaluations were based on the advocacy of Yugoslav cultural unity. We attempt to convey the essential theses that Vodnik himself formed as a supporting part of his method, some of them seemingly incidentally in works of occasional and polemical importance, with the aim of presenting an unbiased and temporally distanced view of the methodologically contradictory but original literary-historical oeuvre that introduced a new, synthetic, and genological-cultural approach into the readings of Croatian writers and understanding of their biographies, which, insufficiently recognised during Vodnikʼs lifetime and understood as a sign of his critical eccentricity and methodological vacillation, gained full momentum in the works of contemporary literary historians of recent literature, who include cultural insights in literary-historical syntheses. Vodnik thus belongs to the forerunners of modern encyclopedic literary biography and a cultural turn in Croatian literary history.