Novel
Olga i Lina
Not translated into English
Eugen Kumičić · 1881
Opening lines
Mjeseca kolovoza 1851. bilo je neobično mnogo ljudi u glasovitom kupalištu N.
In the month of August 1851 there was an unusually large number of people at the famous spa of N.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from hr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
August 1851, in a spa town. Olga, daughter of a Croatian family, spends the summer there; Lina also arrives, coming from abroad with her titled relatives. In Zagreb, a young man who has only his work and his country has loved Olga since childhood. The salons, the barons and the fortunes will decide between the two girls.
Context
The book appeared in 1881, and its title at first carried a different second given name, Liza. Its author was returning from two years spent in Paris, from where he brought back Zola and the techniques of the plot-driven novel: he sought to transplant this naturalism into the literature of his country, against the current then claiming Turgenev as its model, and two years later, in a journal he edited, he published an article of doctrine demanding for Croatian prose the method of the experimental novel. The reception was violent, less for the portrayal of the salons than for the thesis: evil would come from foreigners and from those who have become denationalised. Critics of the following century reproached him with putting the tract before the characters; naturalism, moreover, never took root in the country.
Who it is for
A love story with a plot, told at a brisk pace, in which the political thesis is visible on every page. No French edition exists. It is better to know what the Party of Rights was in Croatia in the 1880s.
Prizes and reception
The first naturalist book in Croatian literature, and the only one by its author to provoke a public quarrel; in its day it was the most widely read in the country after Šenoa.