The Return of Philip Latinovicz is the major fictional work of the Croatian novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist Miroslav Krleža (1893– 1981). Krleža, who was to become a preeminent cultural and political figure in post–World War II Yugoslavia, wrote his finest works in the 1920s and 1930s. Although Krleža regarded himself as primarily a playwright, he wrote four important novels that skillfully combine the heritage of expressionism and the literary turn toward Neorealism. In addition to The Return of Philip Latinovicz, the author’s novels include On the Edge of Reason (Na rubu pameti, 1938), Banquet in Blitva (Banket u Blitvi, 1939), and Banners (Zastave, 1977). These subtly experimental narratives present themselves as novels of ideas, replete with essayistic material and existential questions. The foremost among these works is Krleža’s expressionist-existentialist novel The Return of Philip Latinovicz.
The work is a story about a Croatian modernist painter who after more than 20 years of a successful career abroad returns to his hometown in the Panonian plain. Philip suffers from the prototypical illness of the time, which Krleža terms “neurasthenia.” Hence Philip’s escape from life in the city to the neoromantic bliss of the primitive country landscape is rendered as a melancholic attempt to recover his lost childhood and to disclose the identity of his father. This is also a pilgrimage to find new sources of inspiration. Tormented by anxiety and despair, Philip gradually begins to damn everyone around him. In the course of his intimate purgatory, the protagonist discovers that rural Croatia is no less stained by hypocrisy and dishonesty than the Paris he had fled. Even worse, the provincial attitude that is mired in a past glory is a social illness much more detrimental than Philip’s own melancholia.
The meticulous examination of the sociohistorical drama of a province within the crumbled Austro-Hungarian Empire makes Krleža’s intimate story by far the most important depiction of Croatian society in the interwar period. The lethargic and oppressively detailed mode of narration in the first part of the novel enacts the stifling atmosphere of the post-Hapsburg days in a small-town setting. Yet as a series of unsuccessful characters and abortive actions enter and exit the scene, the narrative is undermined from within by surreptitious black humor. These ambiguities of tone capture the reader in the interstices of the deadly serious and the ludicrous. In the second part of the novel the narrative pace suddenly shifts and the story rushes to its bloodspattered finale.
The appearance of The Return of Philip Latinovicz casts Krleža in a transitional period characterized by a gradual move from expressionist imagery, strong colors, and dramatic verbiage to the Neorealist contrast, societal critique, and simplicity of structure. This fact accounts for the novel’s multiple tonalities, changes of pace, and fusion of styles. Thus the obsessive testimonial description and expressionist experimentation interlace throughout the novel; both modes of representation are, however, continuously undermined by ironic self-questioning. The abrupt change of tone and sudden carnivore imagery toward the end of the novel may catch the reader unawares. Yet this move from a Proustian sense of mood and narration to an emotional and fatalistic whirlpool is an adequate development of the story. In retrospect the reader discovers the subterranean links of motifs and images, and the surreptitious presence of the expressionist turn throughout the novel.
The grotesque violence at the end thus reflects back on the whole of the novel, recasting its mode from a personalized chronicle into a critique of this type of narration. The corrective that Krleža found functional in exercising this metaliterary critique is the expressionist excess of macabre imagery. Thus the seeming disarray of styles and tonalities in the novel is finally revealed as a careful strategy aimed at expressing modernist formal and metatextual concerns.
The Return of Philip Latinovicz presents the unique Croatian contribution to the expressionist novel. This compelling narrative is also a paradigmatic piece of Central European prose between the two world wars; it situates Krleža with other authors such as Bruno Schulz and Robert Musil. The fusion of social concerns and expressionist techniques—characteristic of Krleža’s prose—reaches its peak in this novel. Miroslav Krleža’s later work is characterized by a gradual move from the expressionist innovation toward a narrative form of the imminent social critique, satire.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bogert, Ralph. The Writer as Naysayer: Miroslav Krleza and the Aesthetic of Interwar Central Europe. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1991.
Engelsfeld, Mladen. “Time as a Structural Unit in Krleža’s The Return of Philip Latinovicz.” Slavic and East European Journal 22, no. 3 (1978).
Suhadolc, Joseph. “Miroslav Krleža: The Return of Philip Latinovicz.” Slavic and East European Journal 15, no. 1 (1971).
Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis
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