Ivo Vojnović was a Croatian writer and lawyer. He was a great contemporary voice for Croatian and Yugoslav literature and politics.
Background
Ivo Vojnović was born on October 9, 1857, in Dubrovnik, Croatia. He was the son of Konstantin Vojnović and María de Serraglí. His father was a member of an old noble Serbian family, converted to Catholicism, and a great-grandfather, Djordje, was a Russian army major. Within a year of Vojnović's birth, the family moved to Split. His father started a law practice, but the family continued to spend many summers in Dubrovnik, a city with which Vojnović bonded. Ivo Vojnović was expressly close to his mother, who taught him French, drawing, and painting. When he was seventeen, the family moved to Zagreb. There Vojnović's father became an educator of the law at the new university and a member of Parliament.
Education
Ivo Vojnović attended an Italian high school in Split. He also graduated from the University of Zagreb in 1879.
Career
While still a student, Ivo Vojnović worked as a correspondent for the Zadar-based Narodni list, covering Zagreb's cultural life. He also became a law school assistant, and after graduating, he practiced law as a trainee of the Royal Court Table in Zagreb in 1879-1884, then in Križevci in 1884-1889, in Bjelovar in 1889, and in Zadar in 1889-1891. During a tense political situation in Croatia, Hungarian governor Khuen-Hedevary, believing Vojnović was a political opponent, exiled him to the town of Krizevci for five years. There Vojnović wrote a series of four short stories collectively titled Perom i olovkom, the unfinished novel Ksanta, and his first drama, Psyche, which premiered in Zagreb in 1890. After that, he became a civil servant in 1890-1907 and a dramaturge at the Zagreb National Theater in 1907-1911. Then he was a full-time writer until 1914 when the Austro-Hungarian government imprisoned him in Dubrovnik as a Yugoslav nationalist. Vojnović transferred to Zagreb the following year due to a severe eye illness. From 1919 to 1922, he lived in France and then settled in Dubrovnik. He was admitted to a Belgrade hospital in 1928 for eye treatment and died the following year.
As a writer, Ivo Vojnović published fourteen volumes and saw productions of five of his dramatic works. His prose features a luxuriant, flamboyant style with an abundance of images, comparisons, metaphors, inversions, and other elegant stylistic features. Vojnović was interested in the symbolist movement and admired writers Edmond Rostand and Maurice Mäterlinck. In his work of the mid-1880s, was observed a specific influence of the French realists as Alphonse Daudet, Emile Zola, and Gustave Flaubert.
Vojnović's first published work of fiction, Geranium, appeared in installments in the periodical Vijenac (Wreath) in 1880. Set in Split and bearing the subtitle the Romance of a Spinster, Geranium was widely popular. It tells of Mare, who lost the secret object of her affection to her beautiful yet superficial sister. Mare redirects her unrequited love to an invalid niece, whom she takes into her house, and experiences, for the first time, real happiness.
In the U Magli (In the Fog), the first of the four stories in Perom i olovkom, Vojnović reveals his romantic sentimentalism in a story about a penniless, blind organ grinder in Zagreb who grieves over his dead son. The Sirena is a story that describes the playfulness of three girls enjoying the beaches of the Adriatic. It features Vojnović's own memories of his summers in Dubrovnik. The Rose Mery, set in Vienna, features the enigmatic title character and her doomed love affair with the young Count Marko Branski. Set in Rome, Cemu? (Why?) involves a mysterious female who shows the demonic nature of love to a young violinist from Dubrovnik. Soon after the popular stories were published, they were translated into German and appeared in the Agramer Zeitung.
Vojnović, in his four-act play, Ekvinocij, attempts to dramatize Ksanta. He relates the story of Jela and her lover. He left her to go to America before their son's birth and returns many years later, wealthy. His selfishness endangers their son's happiness. Jela kills her ex-lover and commits suicide that their son and his fiancée may go to America to enjoy the happy life she could never have.
In 1902 Vojnović joined three short plays together to form the triptych Dubrovacka trilogija. They are the Suton, finished in 1889-1890, the Allons enfants, in 1901, and the Na taraci in 1902. The first play, set in 1806, centers on Napoleon's troops entering Dubrovnik. The other two plays depict the further deterioration of the old aristocratic social order and the transformation of the proud and independent republic into an ordinary coastal town and a future sea resort. Dubrovacka trilogija has been called the apogee of Vojnović's dramatic work.
Vojnović's passion for Dubrovnik led to some literary works depicting the nineteenth-century socioeconomic decline of the city-republic. Vojnović's omnipresent lyricism, his sensitivity to music and color, his theatrical craftsmanship and readiness to experiment on the stage, his creation of a gallery of three-dimensional female characters, the detailed and explicit instructions for staging his plays (often longer than the actual dramatic text and an integral part of it), the local dialect saturated with Italianisms, and his nostalgic love for Dubrovnik and its patricians are among the hallmarks of his work.
Politics
Ivo Vojnović was a faithful advocate of Serbian-Croatian brotherhood and Yugoslav unity.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Ivo Vojnović is one of those writers who are in the middle of two kinds of literature and one language, between Serbian and Croatian. He started his work exclusively in Croatian literature, but in time proceeded towards Serbian motif and began writing for the Serbian literary public as well." - Jovan Skerlić
"He has been rightfully called a precursor of the Moderna movement of the early twentieth century, both with his prose, in which the expressive, picturesque element takes precedence over the plot, and his dramatic works, which elevated Croatian drama to a European level." - Thomas Eekman
