Theatre
A Trilogy of Dubrovnik
Dubrovačka trilogija
Ivo Vojnović · 1902
Synopsis
Three afternoons, nearly a century apart. On 27 May 1806, at the house of a Dubrovnik patrician, people await the entry of the French troops and discuss what should be done. In 1832, in a house where only women remain, a daughter of the old nobility loves a sailor. In 1900, on a terrace above the sea, the last of one world watch the next one rise.
Context
The cycle was composed in Dubrovnik at the turn of the century and appeared in volume form in Zagreb in 1902; the three plays were published and performed separately between 1900 and 1903, and each has its own title, the first of which is in French in the original. Two sonnets taken from an earlier collection by the author frame them. The French publisher summarises them thus: the fall of the Republic under Napoleon, then an impossible love between two social conditions, then the end of a caste. The complete French translation, by a French teacher from the Paris suburbs who has given Croatian theatre its most prolific translator, appeared in 2017 from his own publishing house.
Who it is for
Three short plays, which can be read in sequence or one without the others, and of which a complete French translation has existed since 2017. Passages are in Italian in the original.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's masterpiece and as one of the peaks of Croatian theatre; an English version had appeared as early as 1922.