My father, Antonio Janigro, was a famous cellist and conductor. He started the world-renowned orchestra The Zagreb Soloists in 1954. Born in Italy in 1918, he spent the WWII years (from 1939, but we stayed till 1965) in Croatia trying to stay out of the conflict and avoiding recruitment by Mussolini’s army for the ill-fated war in Russia. His fame extended well beyond the city of Zagreb, but Zagreb remained the fulcrum of his musical career. In his honor, every so many years, the city of Zagreb organizes a cello competition named after him. I was at the last Antonio Janigro Cello Competition in Zagreb in January-February 2020, right when COVID 19 reached our awareness and before a devastating earthquake that rattled the capital. While searching for a friend through the many classrooms of the Music Institute in Zagreb, I was approached by a young man who told me: “I obviously never met your father; he was a great man; I am, however, a little bit surprised that you and your family do not put on a well-deserved pedestal your Croatian grandfather, Milutin Cihlar Nehajev”. I quickly agreed with him and went on looking for my friend.
On the endless flight back home (we now live in Cleveland, Ohio), I thought about this young man’s comment and felt ashamed that I never read any of the books of this very famous writer whose grandson I happen to be. Nehajev died 26 years before my birth, a long gap even for my mother to remember him. I remember a few entirely irrelevant details that she mentioned about him besides the fact that he was a famous man, a phenomenal writer, a lover of opera and classical music in general, and a big-time intellectual of the first half of the century. A portrait of him made after he died hung for many years in my parent’s house in Milano; this is pretty much all the hearsay I was made aware of. Somewhere on the Atlantic, I decided that I’d read his books even though Croatian is not any longer my strongest language. As soon as I reached home, I reported to my wife of this encounter; the following day, I ordered on Amazon Bijeg. I was proud to find his whole opus (in Croatian) also at the local public library. This was exactly six months ago, and for you who are reading this today, remember that these were the first six months of COVID, isolation, lockdowns, and no travel.
After reading Bijeg, I could not believe that only a Croatian version of his novels existed and decided to bite a tough and large bullet and translate this phenomenal work of literature into English. It was not all smooth sailing. Croatian is a very complex language grammatically related to Russian. In terms of tortured rules, declinations, verbal forms and even alphabet (30 letters not counting, q,x,y!), Croatian is second to none for its difficulty. In my task, this got compounded by the very angular and convoluted style of Nehajev. I have done my best to resolve convexities within seemingly concave sentences, overcome the constant idiosyncratic punctuation used by Nehajev: the results are in front of you; you will be the judge. I tried as much as I could to convey all these angular features from an over 100-year-old style to the modern reader.
First things should have gone first: the reader may wonder about the significance of the many * scattered throughout the text. By reading this novel, you will notice that temporal shifts in verbal forms and jumps from one situation to another require focus and attention by the reader. To help the reader, Nehajev used
*
to describe an almost continuous temporal shift,
***
for a larger but small temporal shift and finally
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. etc.
for the most extended time spans between actions.
I have added footnotes when I felt that a modern reader might need a little help, and I added two maps to help understand the political history of Croatia at the century mark of the action. Two important facts to keep in mind are that Andrijašević in the book travels from Vienna (Austria) to Budapest (Hungary), to Zagreb, Slavonski Brod, and then to the coast (Senj in Dalmatia). Still, he never crossed a border, because these were all part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose demise in 1918 Nehajev and the world witnessed. Also of relevance is the trichotomy of Croatian locations, the triangle between Zagreb, Senj, and Zdenci. Zagreb was already the center of intellectual life in Croatia, Zdenci was for Nehajev a prototype location to describe peasant’s life while Senj represents the (so maligned in Bijeg!) provincial town. These realities have not changed much in our century, and Zagreb remains the undisputed cultural center of Croatia, or, before the 1990s, Jugoslavija. Perhaps the most significant change is in Senj, due to mass tourism, the primary industry in this small country of 4 million people, of whom 1 million live in the capital alone.
A personal note on Bijeg is now in order. Reading Bijeg made me not only understand the autobiographical aspects of the novel but also made me aware of a transgenerational link. In many ways, Andrijašević is Nehajev’s alter ego. Both were having problems in school , and both were very precocious in developing literary ambitions and successes . I also found my own neuroses in Đuro’s psychology. I am averse to travel and experience travel as an irreversible process of loss; I tend to live as a creature of habit, and as many of us found solace in alcohol at difficult conjunctures. Nehajev briefly sidestepped his life as an author and liberal arts champion; he received a degree in chemistry and worked for a while as a scientist. I made a living as a scientist, but my refuge has always been an amalgam of “serious” music and classic literature.
The readers will draw their conclusions on the role of fate, self-harm, depression and booze on Andrijašević tragic life. Some will blame the eternal financial impossibilities of intellectuals who do not “sell their soul”. Đuro also presents the explanations for his failure to his friend Toša. I stumbled upon a sentence in Melville’s Pierre: “He is learning how to live, by rehearsing the part of death” . In my opinion, this is the best, involuntary, succinct summary of Đuro’s life. ( )