Novel
Posljednji Stipančići
Not translated into English
Vjenceslav Novak · 1899
Opening lines
U jednoj od najstarijih podsvođenih kućica, s ulazom preko strmih kamenitih stuba i balature nad kojom je više vrata uzidana nakazna ljudska glava - tupa, na nepogodama vremena gotovo sasvim iščeznula nosa - sjede u tijesnoj, a jedinoj u svojoj kući sobici dvije ženske glave; starija suhonjava, sitna, crnomanjasta žena od četrdeset i šest godina, i mlađa, djevojka od dvadeset i dvije godine.
In one of the oldest little vaulted houses, reached by steep stone steps and an outside landing above which, higher than the door, a misshapen human head is set into the wall, blunt, its nose almost entirely worn away by the weather, two women are sitting in the narrow little room that is the only one in their house: the elder a small, thin, swarthy woman of forty-six, and the younger a girl of twenty-two.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from hr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Senj, in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Ante Stipančić, last patrician of a house that has nothing left but its name, stakes everything he has left on his son Juraj, whom he sends away to study, and keeps his daughter Lucija shut up at home, without schooling and without outings. The mother says nothing. The town, for its part, knows what the Stipančićs are still worth.
Context
The novel appeared in 1899 in the Matica hrvatska series, with a subtitle that announces the programme: history of a patrician family. The action covers the first three decades of the century, those of the national awakening, and reaches back at times to the forebears of the eighteenth. The decline of the house follows that of the town, which the railway completed by linking the neighbouring port to Hungary. Its author had grown up there and knew its houses one by one; he wrote quickly, pressed by a large family and by the illness that was consuming him, and several of his books bear the mark of it, this one is an exception. Critics in the country regard it as his best, and judge that the daughter of the house is the character in whom his art of building a character succeeded best.
Who it is for
A short novel, with no difficulty in reading, best opened knowing what Senj was: a port on the military frontier that trade had left. No French edition exists.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by critics as the high point of Croatian realism, and the best known of the eight novels of its author, the most prolific writer of the movement.