INTERTEXTUALITY AND MODERNITY IN THE COMPANIONS OF ISIDORA SEKULIĆ

Abstract

In this paper we will consider the presence of poetics and aesthetics of the evil and damnation respectively, typical for the French « damned poets », as well as the presence of the modern, avant-guard spirit in the Companions of Isidora Sekulić. By carrying out a comparative and intertextual analysis, firstly we will gradually discover a whole series of harmful but creative poetic images in Isidora Sekulić’s work; these images draw their origins from black and grotesque romanticism (Hugo, Nodier, Sue, Nerval), then from Baudelaire and his « terrible » successors like Rimbaud and Lautréamont. In addition to this funeral imagery, we will also recognize plastic images of a physical illness, worthy of the realism or « clinical » naturalism of Zola and his successors. Secondly, we highlight the modern spirit of the Companions. This collection was published in 1913, the same year in which Guillaume Apollinare’s Alcools appeared. The collection of prose fragments is the first work of the Serbian writer and at the same time represents a real breath of modernity just like the famous collection of poems by Apollinaire. It is in the context of antitradition and the modern spirit that we bring close the poetry of the French poet and the prose fragments of the Serbian writer. In her « short prose poems » Isidora Sekulić was able to recreate, poetically, her own experience of physical and moral pain. The end goal is to show the depth of Isidora Sekulić’s poetic genius communicating, in an underlying but intense way, the earlier spirits who lived and died under the evil sign of the « Black Sun ».