Narrative
Slavonska šuma
Not translated into English
Josip Kozarac · 1888
Synopsis
The oak forest of Slavonia is treated as a being with its own age, its illnesses and its renewals: what grows in its shade, what exhausts it, what returns when it has been cut. The one who writes is a forester by trade and gives the figures of the timber trade as he gives the species. The text follows the cycle of a year and ends on a felling, before which he says he was never so moved by any cemetery.
Context
The text appeared in the journal Vienac in 1888. Its author, who had graduated in 1879 from the forestry school in Vienna, was then serving in the oak forests of his native province and knew from his profession what he describes: the species, their age, the time a felling takes to close over, and even the prices of the stave wood that was floated down the Sava. His prose and his administrative reports start from the same gaze: Croatian academic research has asked whether this text belonged to literary description or to scientific description, holding it to be a high point of descriptive literature in the country. The last page, before a clear-cut, warns against what unreasonable treatment of the forest costs. The rest of his work tells what capitalism was undoing in the villages.
Who it is for
A few dozen pages without a plot: a sustained description, to be read as such. No French edition. It is worth knowing that Slavonia was then emerging from the regime of the Military Frontier.
Prizes and reception
Croatian literary histories name it, together with a novel of 1889 and a short story of 1894, whenever they sum up its author in three titles.