Literary Critical Understanding of Šantić’s “Mythical” Fame With a Contribution to the Review of the Archive Collection of Aleksa Šantić in the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The paper consists of two, methodological and analytical, separate parts, which share the character and work of Aleksa Šantić. The first part tries, through an overview of critical valorisation, to literary critically understand the entire poetic creation of Aleksa Šantić, posing the fundamental research question of why Šantić is considered a great poet, even though his poetry, taken as a whole, viewed from an aesthetic perspective, cannot be qualified as “great”. Above all, based on the insight of criticism into the consideration of the aesthetic value of Šantić’s poetry and the conclusions derived from the comparison of already existing and own reflections, the above question is answered with the hypothesis that Šantić’s “mythical” greatness is the result of the “ordinariness” of his poetry and the ability to give that “ordinariness” a sublime sense of the “topos” of spiritual preoccupation, on the semantic level, and on the syntactic level, expressed in a simple style and phrases close to the cognitive needs of the peoples’ consciousness. The second part of the paper presents a documentary-historical and archival-library contribution to the research of the character and works of Aleksa Šantić, and appears as a separate review of the legacy of manuscript material kept by the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Department of Special Collections. The legacy consists of letters, correspondence, photographs, letter cards, and postcards. These biographical and historical documents serve as a source for a factual introduction to a part of Šantić’s life and activities. The work is the result of research conducted on the basis of the project “Unification of materials on the cultural and historical heritage of Aleksa Šantić” financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Science.