Magic of the Enchanted Mirror and Confession
The emergence of Fran Galović's avant-garde and postmodernism
The literary work of Fran Galović is, on the one hand, based in the folk literary tradition that touches on national issues, while on the other hand, it is part of cosmopolitan European aestheticism. Continuing his work in the folk literary tradition, Fran Galović writes dramas, the most famous of which is the drama "Tamara" (1907), while also touching on the collection of poems "Četiri grada" (1913), the stories Enchanted Mirror (1913) and Confession i (1914). The interestingness of Galović's works is the connotation of science fiction, where he shows creative imagination, versatility and passion, and his works The Enchanted Mirror and The Confession can serve as an example of this. Namely, in these short stories, Galović abandons the previous tradition of realism and turns to modernism at an early stage. The enchanted mirror destroys the forms of the traditional fable and gives way to the role of the narrator, which is precisely impressionistic. In a similar way, he modifies Confession by introducing avant-garde characteristics such as grotesque, magic and introduces the role of a demonic hero as a symbol of pre-expressionist sensibility. Milivoj Solar, a Croatian literary theorist who received his doctorate in 1964 with a dissertation on Fran Galović, calls Galović's Confession "one of the best sermons of the Croatian modern period, written in the style of the avant-garde, so that today even elements of postmodernism can be recognized in it", with which one can to be agreed by the one who read it.
