Short stories
Mi smo za pravicu
Not translated into English
Slavko Kolar · 1936
Synopsis
Stories of village and small-town life: a young woman whom illness makes useless in her husband's eyes, neighbours who agree to have the person who bothers them locked up, a minor official who thinks he has made it. At first we laugh, and only afterwards do we realise what we have just read.
Context
The collection appeared in 1936 in Zagreb from the Matica hrvatska, two hundred and fifty pages, and brings together six stories, two of them among the best known in the country. Croatian criticism holds these stories, with those of the 1933 book, to be their author's most accomplished. An agronomist engineer by profession, he wrote from what he saw on the estates where he served, and he himself spoke of his disappointment with his first book, whose humour, he judged, stayed on the surface. His humour here runs from barely perceptible irony to the grotesque, and often joins the tragic to the comic: it targets villages and peasants, but also the half-learned, civil servants, careerists and politicians of every stripe, and denounces corruption and social injustice.
Who it is for
Short stories in simple language, several of which have long been on the curriculum of Croatian schools. There is no French edition.
Prizes and reception
With the one from 1933, the high point of the Croatian short story of the thirties, and the source of two or three texts that the country knows by heart.
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