Božo Vodušek’s Disenchanted World

Abstract

Božo Vodušek’s poetry—full of dissonances and discrepancies, conflicts, and battles—originates from the egocentric center of the lyrical subject, to which the poet’s mental reflexes as well as sensual and emotional responses to the external world of phenomena are tied. Hence, the great directness in revealing his own self and ultimate subjectivity in all of the motif circles that are connected by a disillusion in discovering and experiencing the world. In addition to the static component of the poet’s personality, it also contains a dynamic development tendency. The collection Odčarani svet (The Disenchanted World) thus became an aesthetic document of the author, who radically breached the basic views from his youth twice: in the context of his world view, when he moved from Catholicism to a personal quest for the meaning of life, and in the context of literature, when he surpassed expressionism and developed into an individual co-creator of the verbal art of New Objectivity. The literary critics of that time responded emotionally to the poetry collection written by such a person and contextualized it within a broad area of reception. While emphasizing Vodušek’s expressionism and regretting that he nearly completely renounced his youthful poetic period in this collection, the Catholic side adopted different views towards Odčarani svet, ranging from affirmative reception with reservations to complete rejection. Liberal criticism was also divided; it moved from rejecting expressionism in advance and detailed interpretation of poetry, while identifying with the Catholic criticism of the missing emotional content in an intellectual poet. The Marxist criticism was similarly divided. Its ideological dogmatic part completely rejected the collection. In contrast, the more liberal Marxists accepted Vodušek’s collection and gave it uniform recognition.