Vladimir Nazor

Vladimir Nazor
Bust of Vladimir Nazor by Zvonko Car, in Crikvenica, Croatia
1st President of PR Croatia President of the Presidium of the People's Assembly of PR Croatia
In office 25 August 1945 – 19 June 1949
Prime Minister	Pavle Gregorić Vladimir Bakarić
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Karlo-Gašpar Mrazović
Chairman of the ZAVNOH
In office 3 June 1943 – 25 August 1945
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Office dissolved
Personal details
Born	30 May 1876(1876-05-30) Postira (Brač), Kingdom of Dalmatia, Austria-Hungary
Died	19 June 1949(1949-06-19) (aged 73) Zagreb, PR Croatia, FPR Yugoslavia
Nationality	Croat
Political party	Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ)[citation needed]

Vladimir Nazor ( May 30, 1876, Postira, Brač – June 19, 1949, Zagreb) was the first head of state of modern Croatia. A member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), he led the Croatian World War II wartime assembly, the ZAVNOH, and later served as the President of the Presidium of the People's Assembly of PR Croatia - the head of state of the People's Republic of Croatia. Today he is most remembered, however, as a well-known Croatian 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.

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 (Veli Jože) (1908) is still popular: it features a helpful and kind hearted giant named Jože, living in the area around the town of Motovun (Inner Istria). His verses in Hrvatski kraljevi (Croat Kings) (1912) established him as the great patriot poet in Croatia. Istrian Tales (Istarske priče) (1913) 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.^[1] During World War II, on December 30, 1941, Nazor became a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts by government decree,^[2] 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 (Čamac na Kupi) 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 (President of the Presidium of the People's Assembly), 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 (S partizanima) (1943–1945).

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 (Pastir Loda) (1938). 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 sonets, 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 arhaic words.

Nazor wrote over 500 poems. His poetry implicates that art is aestheticly stronger than reality, for art reflects the essence of real world. Early phase of Nazor's poetrv work is mostly object of scholars' research now, but Galérien's Poeme (Galiotova pesan) from that time (1903), 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; unfortunately, it is very difficult for translating, because it is written in Chakavian dialect.

Nazor probably reached the highest scope in poems of so called pagan phase, published in books of verse Lyrics (Lirika) (1910) and New Poems (Nove pjesme) (1913). 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 (Čempres), Dionysian Poems (Dionizijske pjesme), Cicada (Cvrčak) and Olive (Maslina), as well as contemplative experience and spiritualizing of natural appearances - Turris eburnea, Notturno, Forest Sleeps (Šuma spava), Trunk (Stablo) and Spider (Pauk), 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 (Dante - Divina Commedia, Giosuè Carducci, Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele d'Annunzio), German (Goethe, Heine), French (Hugo, Alfred de Musset) and English (Shakespeare).

Nazor was buried in Mirogoj Cemetery.^[3] Since 1959, Croatia has named a state award for artistic achievement the Vladimir Nazor Award.

Works

• List of Nazor's work on Croatian Wikipedia
• Na vrhu jezika i pera, Croatian Publishing and Bibliographic Institute, 1942

His works have been translated into following languages (incomplete list):

• Italian
• Hungarian
• Slovenian
• German

References

1. ^ Vladimir Nazor, Croatian Radiotelevision
2. ^ Tko je tko u NDH, "Vladimir Nazor". Minerva. Zagreb, 1997
3. ^ Vladimir Nazor at Gradska Groblje

Political offices
New title	President of the Presidium of the People's Assembly of PR Croatia 25 August 1945 – 19 June 1949	Succeeded by Karlo-Gašpar Mrazović
	Chairman of the ZAVNOH 13 June 1943 – 25 August 1945	Abolished

Persondata
Name	Nazor, Vladimir
Alternative names
Short description	Croatian writer and politician
Date of birth	30 May 1876
Place of birth	Postira (Brač), Dalmatia, Austria-Hungary
Date of death	19 June 1949
Place of death	Zagreb, PR Croatia, FPR Yugoslavia