Carnival image of Central Europe in Hašek's Tales from Croatia and the Surroundings

Jakov Sabljić & Tina Varga Oswald, Chroatia, ID CLEaR2017-461;    Abstract: Love in Međimurje: Tales from Croatia and the Surroundings is a collection of short stories, literary sketches and humoresques written by Jaroslav Hašek in the period between 1904 and 1914, inspired by his so-called ‘missionary’ travels to the north of Croatia, as well as to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Italy, Slovenia and Hungary in 1905. Hašek's travelogue wandering is an anecdotal narrative about the people he met and the events he witnessed, read about or heard of by word of mouth in the ‘colonized’ areas of Central Europe. Furthermore, the narrative is a form of resistance using the narrator voice of a Central European author who opposes the externally imposed imperial bureaucracy, with direct experience and confirmed perception of the accentuated carnivalesque image of Central Europe. Accordingly, the individual elements of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque image of the world such as irony, hyperbole, repetition, enumeration, parody, grotesque, profanation of characters, travesty and destructuralization of ‘grand themes’ are identified and analysed.

Keywords: Jaroslav Hašek, carnivalization, Love in Međimurje, Central Europe