Vladimir Nazor


Vladimir Nazor was a Croatian poet and politician who served as the first President of the Presidium of the Croatian Parliament, and first Speaker of the Croatian Parliament.
Nazor began his political career as the head of the State Anti-fascist Council for the National Liberation of Croatia, the provisional Croatian World War II deliberative assembly, moving on to head the first post-war Croatian National Parliament. In that post, he was by law concurrently the first head of state of Croatia in general, and the de facto first head of state of the current Croatian republic. His position carried little real political power, which was instead invested in the office of the Prime Minister and with the Secretary of the Communist Party of Croatia.
Nazor is however most remembered as a well-known poet, writer, translator, and humanist. Although he was not an active politician until 1941, he had a significant political influence through ethical aspects of his work during prewar Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Early career

Nazor's early work paralleled the rise of the Young Croatian literary movement. He acquired much literary popularity in Croatia writing about folk legends and stories. The tale Big Joseph is still popular: it features a helpful and kind hearted giant named Jože, living in the area around the town of Motovun. His verses in Hrvatski kraljevi established him as the great patriot poet in Croatia. Istrian Tales revealed his storytelling skill and mastery. By illuminating the personality of the South Slavs through tales of Croatia, he contributed a great deal in creating the Yugoslav national consciousness.
Nazor supported the opposition alliance led by Vladko Maček in the 1938 Yugoslav elections. During World War II, on 30 December 1941, Nazor became a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts by government decree, but in 1942 he escaped from Zagreb with poet Ivan Goran Kovačić in a boat across the river Kupa, that was sublimed in poem The Boat on the Kupa and joined the Partisans. Nazor became one of Josip Broz Tito's closest associates and the President of Croatia's World War II assembly, the ZAVNOH. After the war, he became the first president of the People's Republic of Croatia's Parliament, and thus the first head-of-state of the modern Croatian state in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. He went on to write a war diary With Partisans .

As a poet

Nazor was a very productive author. He was the master of prose, but his highest achievements are in lyric poetry. One of his main prose works is the extensive novel Loda the Shepherd . The work describes the history of his native island of Brač as told by Loda, a faun, one of the last of that kind on the island.
In poetry Nazor's creative way began from metaphysical transcendental philosophy and arrived to materialistic revolutionary action, to rational scheme and harmonic larpourlartistic crystal structure and interior protest against artistic verbalizing in Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism and Surrealism as well as instructive didactics of socialist realism. Therefore, his opus comprises a plenty of style tendencies, from neoclassical to surrealistic and despite its heterogeneity, in essence it belongs to Symbolism. Nazor's poems are rather difficult for reading, due to subjecting contents to form – especially in sonnets, rhime and rhythm forcing, vowels shortening for adjusting the number of syllables and progressing the sentence to the next verse as well as use of academic, atypical, rare and archaic words.
Nazor wrote over 500 poems. His poetry implicates that art is aesthetically stronger than reality, for art reflects the essence of real world. Early phase of Nazor's poetry work is mostly object of scholars' research now, but Galérien's Poeme from that time, describing suffering and sadness of a galley slave, attains universal meanining as condemnation of oppressing at all and still stands as one of the most expressive disapproval of slavery.
Nazor probably reached the highest scope in poems of so-called pagan phase, published in books of verse Lyrics and New Poems . Passionately ecstatic, these poems comprise symbols of life, its eternal fertility, pantheistic metamorphoses of nature and sensual affirmation of love; life prevails for life itself, so life is taken in its whole versatility. Vitalistic view of life and fascination by countryside – Cypress, Dionysian Poems, Cicada and Olive, as well as contemplative experience and spiritualizing of natural appearances – Turris eburnea, Notturno, Forest Sleeps, Trunk and Spider, dominate in the heights of that phase, and these are the heights of Nazor's poetry at all. Poems Cicada, Olive, Notturno and Forest Sleeps belong to the top of the World poetry.
Vladimir Nazor spoke several languages and translated from Italian, German, French and English.
Nazor was buried in Mirogoj Cemetery. Since 1959, Croatia has named a state award for artistic achievement the Vladimir Nazor Award. In 2008, a total of 306 streets in Croatia were named after Nazor, making him the second most common person eponym of streets in the country.

Works

His works have been translated into following languages :