Intercultural and interlingual dialogue in the literary work of Zofka Kveder (}}From the Life of the House-maid from Zagreb(( and }}Hanka(()
Abstract
We analyze intercultural and interlingual dialogue and the representation of the other nations in the literary texts of Slovenian-Croatian author Zofka Kveder
(1878-1926). She was a Central European intellectual, balancing between different cultures. She began to write in the context of the transformation of Central European culture of which Slovenia was a part of until the end of the First World War. Zofka Kveder was the author of Slovenian Moderna with the more linguistic identities. She was connected also to Czech culture. She lived in Prague from 1900 until 1906, then she moved to Zagreb (Croatia). Her work was successfully published in Czech and well- known to
Czech readers till the outbreak of the First World War. In the focus of our interest are two texts from different periods and different cultures of her life: a Czech novel Ze života zahřebské služky (From the Life of the Zagreb's Maiden, 1908) and a Croatian novel
Hanka (1915, 1918).
In the novel Ze života zahřebské služky we reconstruct and analyse Croatian motives.
The text belongs to the texts published only in the Czech language. The picture of Croatian heroes and the image of Zagreb are more stylisation and an ornament in the narrative.
The story is above all sharp criticism of the patriarchal society anywhere in the big Central European cities in the beginning of 20th Century. In the epistolary Croatian novel Hanka, published first in Zagreb, the main hero is a Polish female intellectual, who is thrown in the First World War apocalypse: after divorce she settles in Prague and works as a nurse in a war hospital. The construction of her Polishness is very important and a part of her identity: the identity of the "Modern Woman", who is conscious about her intimate life, and also about the traumatic historical situation. This is also a subversive war novel, full of pacifist thoughts. As a war pacifist and patriot, she feels responsible for the nation and all the world.
Slovene-Croat Zofka Kveder was a hybrid writer and an important person in the
Feminist movement in the first part of the 20th century in the Central European area.
She wrote in different languages and her work was translated in different languages. In analysing her texts, we find a lot of pictures of the Other nation and culture. The multicultural dialogue is part of her writer's strategy with different functions and it also shows the cultural context of her writing.