In glory to life above gods as small as bees: On the work of Slobodan Džunić in the 1960s (novel Pagani, 1964)

The focus of this manuscript is Slobodan Džunić's novel Pagani, which, after his post-war prose books (three books of stories and one novel), brought its author a kind of institutional recognition by being published in a prestigious edition of contemporary Yugoslav writers. The novel Pagani represented a multiple breakthrough in Džunić's approach to prose. He completely abandoned the models of psychological realism and family genealogy and created a novel whose medium becomes its main substance, that is, the linguistic and stylistic layer of the novel, drawing material from the idioms of the vernacular and everyday speech, which opened the door wide for the creative use of the local dialect. The novel Pagani is based on two dominant traditions: one is the bucolic tradition, which we follow in the work from its progenitor, the Roman poet Virgil, through the pastoral songs of oral folk lyrics from the Babušnica region to the artistic poetry of the interwar period by Momčilo Nastasijević in the poem "Flute". The other is a tradition that has a mythical-ethnological essence and belongs to "folk-comic performances" and "grotesque realism", as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of François Rabelais's 16th-century novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. This tradition originates from church holidays and folk customs, which are then expressed through the form of carnival, that is, through the creation of a utopian world in which class and professional differences and power relations are temporarily erased, and social communication is dominated by cheerful relativity, comic mockery in which no one is excluded, and the celebration of life and the renewal of the annual cycles of nature. In Džunić's work, the feast of the harvest is important, marking the end of winter and the beginning of spring, accompanied by the custom of olalija, and the rite of dodol, while the novel ends in summer, in anticipation of the harvest. Of crucial importance for the plot of the novel Pagani is the erotic tension between two couples, newcomers to the fictional village of Sprudište and a monk and a nun, which forms the core of an otherwise rather flat plot. The novel Pagani defines a combination of two categories: the comic and the erotic, which are connected by a carnival atmosphere and utopian projections within a pastoral context. In comparison with the novel A Short Trip by Antun Šoljan, which has a similar poetic basis and was published in the same period, two different possibilities of the post-war Yugoslav modernist novel can be noted