ANTE KADIĆ
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Journal of Croatian Studies, XX, 1979, – Annual Review of the Croatian Academy of America, Inc. New York, N.Y., Electronic edition by Studia Croatica, by permission. All rights reserved by the Croatian Academy of America.
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Vjekoslav Kaleb is one of those good, conscientious, and serious authors whom other writers and literary critics read and appreciate much more than the general public, which enjoys light and amusing stories.
Born in 1905 at Tijesno, on the island of Murter, near Šibenik, Kaleb was an elementary school teacher in the backward Dalmatian hinterland (Zagora, between the mountain Kozjak and the river Krka) for sixteen years, from 1924 until 1940, when he became a civil servant in Zagreb. He joined the partisans in 1943. After the war, he served as editor of various literary periodicals; he was secretary of Matica Hrvatska and president of the Union of Croatian Writers. Now Kaleb lives in "retirement," which he spends (when not fishing or sailing during the summer) in reading and writing.
In 1940, when he was thirty-five years old, Kaleb published his first collection of stories, Na kamenju (On the Rocks). He was immediately hailed as one of the most talented Croatian writers. The majority of critics were pleased with his interesting material and particular style. Sima Matavulj and Dinko Šimunović had already depicted the primitive, barren, poverty-stricken Dalmatian plateau (both had taught in this area), but Kaleb looked at this same desolate region and its inhabitants from substantially different angle.[1] Kaleb's stories do not glorify the peasants as the representatives of honesty and the happy patriarchal life. On the contrary, in a calm, unemotional, concise manner he depicts the desert-like countryside and analyzes the minute movements and deeds of individuals who sometimes behave like animals. All day long they think of how to fill their empty bellies, how to conserve the bit of energy which still remains in them.
Parents have too many children (they have never heard about birth-control), but they celebrate their departure to "the better world" with a feast; they sometimes actively engage in infanticide. In his story Na kamenju, Kaleb sketches the apathy of parents who continue to live from day to day. They gradually cut down trees and sell everything which can be sold in order to buy food, or preferably drink; they even steal hard-earned money from their own youngsters whom they then leave in rags and starvation.[2] When the step-mother beats to death a small girl who "ate a bit of flour" (!), the girl's deaf-mute brother cuts the half-witted and rapacious woman's throat with a razor. Their father, who is equally hungry and at the end of his strength, nevertheless takes his dying daughter into his arms while tears run abundantly down his cheeks.
See complete article at: http://www.studiacroatica.org/jcs/20/2005.htm
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Journal of Croatian Studies, XX, 1979, – Annual Review of the Croatian Academy of America, Inc. New York, N.Y., Electronic edition by Studia Croatica, by permission. All rights reserved by the Croatian Academy of America.
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