Short stories
Mrkodol
Not translated into English
Dinko Šimunović · 1909
Opening lines
Nad zagorskim selom Mrkodolom puhao je čas slabiji a čas jači vjetar sad s jedne sad s druge strane.
Over Mrkodol, a village of the Zagora, a wind blew, now weaker, now stronger, now from one side, now from the other.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from hr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Five stories from inland Dalmatia: a stone village where nothing moves and where one marries as one inherits, a little girl who sets out to find the foot of the rainbow, a boy who has been prepared since childhood for the Sinj ring tournament. The central characters are almost always women, and what constrains them is always custom.
Context
The five pieces had appeared one by one in magazines between 1905 and 1908; the book gathers them in 1909 and takes the title of the first. The reception was immediate, and three of the critics who then counted, Milutin Cihlar Nehajev, Branko Vodnik and Antun Gustav Matoš, saw in it an event and a storyteller with no known master. Its author, a village schoolteacher, was transferred immediately afterwards to a school in Split, where he spent nearly twenty years. He wrote some sixty short stories in all, later collected in two other volumes, and it is in this one that the two or three texts the country knows by heart are found.
Who it is for
Five stories that can be read separately. No French edition exists. It is better to know that the Sinjska alka is a horsemen's tournament, and that the region described was then the poorest in Dalmatia.
Prizes and reception
A first book received as a literary event, and the source of the two short stories that Croatian schools still read.