Krleža's unfulfilled love or comfortable restlessness of gender conflicts

The fundamental idea of this article is to connect the gender antagonism in Krleža's border works of the first dramatic cycle, the rarely performed plays On the Eve (1919) and Adam and Eve (1922) with the tradition of tabooing sexuality from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, by the inventiveness of the sociological analyses of that time, and the achievements of modern evolutionary psychology. The psychographic points of a "couple in a sexual snuggle" (Gašparović, 1977), dissolve in the characters as bearers of universal symbols. Although enclosed in the apparent triviality of exaggerated psychologisation (Donat, 1970), Krleža's malefemale miniatures through zoometaphors and mythico-dramatic parallels raise the question of how love relationships from the early 20th century managed to maintain the dominance of the spoken word over the physical and the emotional.