ZLATKO TOMIČIĆ, CROATIAN POET AND DISSIDENT
(Some Bio-bibliographical Data)
ANTUN NIZETEO
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Journal of Croatian Studies, XXI, 1980, – Annual Review of the Croatian Academy of America, Inc. New York, N.Y., Electronic edition by Studia Croatica, by permission. All rights reserved by the Croatian Academy of America.
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Zlatko Tomičić was born on May 26, 1930, in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where his father, a tailor from Lika, and his mother, a civil servant from Slavonia, were then living. He completed his secondary education in Vinkovci, Slavonia, and graduated from the Philosophical Faculty of the Hrvatska Sveučilište (Croatian University) in Zagreb. Under other circumstances he would probably have become a professor of comparative literature and of the Czech and Slovak languages.
But, as Tomičić himself pointed out in a 1967 interview in Kerub, "the artist in a small nation like Croatia is not only an artist but also a self-sacrificing cultural worker. At any time that Croatian literature has threatened to become artificial, it has been revived through healthy struggle in the cultural field". Consequently, Tomičić was compelled from 1948 to 1954 to work as a journalist in Yugoslavia, but his dissident views made it ever more difficult for him to work for the government-controlled press. From 1954 to 1968 he made a living as a free-lance writer and through the publication of his literary works.
In 1968, two years after Tito's dismissal of Alexander Ranković --the Yugoslav Beria, long-time secret police chief notorious for his cruelty, especially toward the Croats— in an atmosphere of deceptive liberalization Tomičić and his associates of the literary circle TIN started to publish a monthly called Hrvatski kniževni list (The Croatian Literary Journal). Because it was the first independently published periodical in Yugoslavia since the establishment of the Communist regime in 1945, and also because of its dissident and Croatian nationalist views, Hrvatski književni list rapidly became a mass-circulation publication, pulling ahead of all government sponsored newspapers and magazines published in the Socialist Republic of Croatia. No doubt this was the reason that in 1969 the Communist authorities suppressed Tomičić's journal, although neither he nor his associates were charged with criminal violations at that time. However, following Tito's purges of 1971-72 Tomičić was arrested. Incidentally, the same destiny that befell Tomičić's Hrvatski književni list awaited Hrvatski tjednik (The Croatian Weekly), a biweekly issued by Matica hrvatska, the most prestigious Croatian national cultural institution and publisher, whose chief editor was Vlado Gotovac, another distinguished Croatian poet, philosopher, and dissident.[1]
After his arrest in 1972 Tomičić was held in prison for several months before he was brought to trial on various charges dating back to 1962. Among other things, Tomičić was charged with "seeking forcibly to overthrow the Yugoslav system and government", with having written the "Fourth Epistle to the Croats," in which he had "openly called for the separation of the Socialist Republic of Croatia from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia"; and furthermore, with having written and circulated an unpublished poem "Obećana zemlja" (The Promised Land); and finally, that he was in touch with and had received correspondence from various "enemy exiles from Croatia now living in the USA". As the result, on November 5, 1972, Tomičić was sentenced to three years in prison, but on March 15, 1973, the Supreme Court of Croatia found Tomičić guilty of additional charges and increased his sentence to five years at hard labor. The Supreme Court found "evidence" that the defendant Tomičić had "falsely alleged that a majority of the Croatian people wish to separate Croatia from Yugoslavia and establish their own independent Croatian Stare". The decision of the Supreme Court moreover asserted that through his contacts with the Croatian emigration Tomičić had encouraged the emigré press to attack the Yugoslav government.
While serving his sentence in the infamous Stara Gradiška prison, Tomičić on several occasions was forcibly administered drugs which he neither asked for nor wanted, such as iodine, paramin, etc., which weaken the kidneys and heart, or in the case of paramin can cause insanity. Various international organizations like the International PEN Club, the League of Human Rights of the United Nations and Amnesty International along with some individuals like the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Bőll intervened and lodged protests with the Yugoslav government, and the international press wrote about the case of Tomičić on several occasions. As the result the government of Yugoslavia released Tomičić from prison in December 1974.
Once discharged from prison Tomičić could not find employment nor in the government-controlled society could he publish his literary works. By 1970 the police had already confiscated his passport so that he was not able to travel abroad. One year after he was released from prison, on November 13, 1975, he suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized for two months. From 1975 to 1978 he was three times under medical care, and during these medical treatments, he received small payments from the state disability fund. However, they were immediately terminated when he met with some dissidents in June 1978. Even though his physicians certified him to be 90% disabled, he was denied the usual disability pension.
During Tito's visit to Zagreb in July 1977, Tomičić was arrested .and held in prison without charges. In January 1980, when Tito was gravely ill, Tomičić was again arrested and jailed on the Adriatic island of Lošinj. On that occasion, on January 23, 1980, the police searched his house, without a court warrant, arrested him, and confiscated all of his literary works representing years of effort, including a novel based on his experience in the notorious Stara Gradiška prison.[2] Neverthless, after a time Tomičić was again released and returned to Zagreb, where sick and without a job he continues with his creative literary work.
In the meantime, Tomičić signed the "Zahtjev za amnestiju političkih osudjenika" (Petitions for Amnesty for Political Convicts), which a group of forty eminent Croatian intellectuals, artists, writers, and dissidents addressed on November 12, 1980, to the government of the Socialist Republic of Croatia and the Presidency of the Government of Yugoslavia.
Though a Croatian patriot and dissident, Zlatko Tomičić, the author of the poem "Hrvatska ljubavi moja" (Croatia My Love) is primarily a poet, homme de lettres, journalist, essayist, story-teller, dramatist, and publisher. As a matter of fact, he has been the author of about twenty published books, his work covering most of the literary categories but chiefly poetry, such as Vode pod ledinom (The Waters Under the Lawn) 1955 Četvrtoga ne razumijem (The Fourth One I Do Not Understand) 1955, Dosegnuti ja (Myself Attained) 1956, Nema blaga nad slobodom (There Is No Treasure Like Liberty) 1956, Budni faun (The Wakened Faun) 1960, Balada uspravnog čovjeka (The Ballad of the Upright Man) 1964, Revolucionarni kalendar (The Revolutionary Calendar) 1965, Bogumilsko groblje (The Bogomil Graveyard) 1968, Zir, 1968, Hrvatsko more (The Croatian Sea) 1969, Traženje bivstva (The Search for the Essence) 1969, and Boj s andjelom (The Battle with the Angel) 1970. Among his books of travel are Nestrpljivi život (The Impatient Life) 1956, Put k Meštroviću (The Road to Meštrović) 1965, and U zemlji Samovoj (In the Land of Samo, i.e. Czechoslovakia) 1966. At Christmas 1970 Tomičić addressed from Zagreb to his countrymen at home and abroad a patriotic message, Poslanica Hrvatima o Novom ljetu 1971 (The 1971 New Year Epistle to the Croats). Tomičić has also published four plays: Nos (Nose) 1962, Besmrtni cvijet (Immortal Flower) 1967, Stravinja, 1968, and Kain, 1977. A master of the prose poem, Tomičić with the poet Dragutin Tadijanović compiled the first anthology in Croatian literature of that literary form, Antologija hrvatskih pjesama u prozi (An Anthology of Croatian Prose Poems) 1958. In prison Tomičić prepared two collections of poems, Soneti sužnja (The Sonnets of the Captive) and Moćvara (The Swamp). Unfortunately the latter manuscript was confiscated by the Stara Gradiška prison authorities. After his release from jail he wrote a novel about prison life, a work which like many other of his works, remains unpublished. Two collections of his poetry, Roda iz Hrvatske (The Stork from Croatia) and Tvrdi kruh (Hard Bread), are expected soon to be published in translation in Italy and France respectively.
Tomičić s literary productions, and especially the poetical creations, were well accepted from the beginning by many critics. Thus, even in the late 1950's Professor Ante Kadić of Indiana University listed Tomičić among the "leading voices" of the postwar generation of Croatian poets:
I shall single out for special attention Tomičić whom Novak Simić, a prominent Croatian novelist and critic, has described as "one of the most gifted representatives of our young generation of poets; he has presented us with some poems which belong among the best creations of our postwar lyric poetry."... Tomičić's is a very versatile mind, and the thematic richness of his poems is a constant source of amazement... Certain critics have said of Tomičić that his is an unbridled and self-willed temperament reminding one of the tempestuous and exalted youth of the generation of Janko Polk-Kamov. He reminds others, however, of the early Ivo Andrić...[3]
Another Croatian critic, Krsto Špoljar (1930-1977), maintains that Tomičić
in his first poems frequently used personification, and he attributed to inanimate objects the characteristics of a person or an idea "More" [The Sea], "Zemlja" [The Land], "Beskonačna, vječna voda" [The Endless Eternal Water)). He expresses himself with particular success in his prose poems. His poetical work is characterized by insistence on the elementariness of emotions and of life, and at the same time, by some horror over the power of raw force. Then, there is the strong concern with sex, which appears not as a glorification of the libido but in conflict with it. He often uses subjects from ancient literature, but he treats them in his own way, and he imposes upon these themes his own ethnics. According to him, the human being is an "incessant creator," but nevertheless the force and powers of nature create the word with-out his participation and make from man only a docile beast in the "incredible garden" of natural laws.[4]
Another critic Tomislav Ladan, an excellent specialist in Croatian poetry, has the following to say about Tomičić:
His numerous poems often have a biblical intonation. The topic is predominantly "privatistic" and "intimistic" (love, hormones, body, force). By his own convictions, he is a vitalist, a glorifier of origins (primordial times), of the foundations of life...[5] 6
Professor Mirosav Vaupotić of the University of Zagreb, a critic and literary historian, describes Tomičić's achievement as follows:
Zlatko Tomičić (b. 1930) is an exceedingly prolific and versatile man of letters, travel writer, and collectioner of folk poetry. His poetic creation is perhaps anchored deepest in tradition, ranging from the sonnet form and the biblical psalmodic verse to a special individual incantation, an integration of spoken and melodic elements, as evident in his poetic prose, in which neglected genre he is one of the outstanding figures in the post-Ujevićian period. An elemental poetic imagination and a power over vigorous words are the basic characteristics of Tomičić's poetry, in all its thematic registers: from the pantheistic praise of the fundamental elements of existence, biblical and mythological paraphrases, satirical grotesques, from the reflexiveness of diary-form lyricism and the latest poems with historical subject-matter.[6]
Certainly one of the most extensive and stimulating studies of the early poetry of Tomičić (1947-1964) is the perceptive doctoral dissertation Zlatko Tomičić: poeta della natura a dell'uomo (Zlatko Tomičić: Poet of Nature and Man) which Maria Pia Valpiana submitted in 1968-69 to the University of Padua. This thesis, which mainly discusses Tomičić's collection of poems Balada uspravnog čovjeka (The Ballad of the Upright Man) (1964), includes a comprehensive bibliography and is published in part in this present issue of the Journal of Croatian Studies.
Also in this issue of the Journal is a selection of Tomičić poems in Croatian and English versions by various translators. We would like to call to the attention of the reader that some time ago there appeared in the Journal the "Selected Poems" of Zlatko Tomičić, translated with commentary by Hilda Prpić.[7]
Although the range of Tomičić's poetry is wide, it seems that over the first decade its popularity gained along with his dissident activity as well as because of his poems on patriotic, religious, and national topics such as "Hrvatska ljubavi moja" (Croatia My Love), "Zagreb, grad nikad izdan" (Zagreb, the City Never Betrayed), "Pjesma hrvatskogo prognanika (The Song of the Croatian Exile), and "Neranjivi bad" (The Invulnerable Ban of Croatia). This does not mean at all that the poet has made concessions or compromises in his art or has shown any aspiration to popularity. A man and poet like Tomičić whose whole life and work show contempt for conformity and aversion for so-called "engaged" literature would never indulge in such measures. The same could be asserted about his religious feeling expressed in many of the spiritual poems for which he is admired by a multitude of readers as a truly "Catholic poet" and "Christian mystic," and on the other hand is quoted by a minority with the same epithets but used with irony and contempt.[8]
Perhaps such aspects and motives were behind the expulsion of Tomičić —a member of the European Community of Writers, International League of Poets (Rome), and PEN Club—from the Society of Croatian Writers and the League of Writers of Yugoslavia. His membership was canceled after his release from prison, without any written or oral notification.
On the other hand, it is noteworthy that the press of many Western countries, especially the United States, France, and Italy, has devoted some attention to the case of Tomičič as a Croatian writer imprisoned by the Yugoslav regime. Even in 1969, for instance, the Paris newspaper Le Monde in an article on Tomičić called him "a great Croatian poet", while in the United States some papers were calling him "the Croatian Solzhenytsin".
[1] See in this issue of the Journal of Croatian Studies the essay on V. Gotovac by Ante Kadić.
[2] The above information is taken from the foreign press, chiefly from the article "The Case of the Croatian Writer Zlatko Tomičić", in Danica, LIX, no. 27. July 4, 1980.
[3] Ante Kadić, Contemporary Croatian Literature (Gravenhage, Mouton, 1960), p. 84-85.
[4] Književni godišnjak (The Literary Almanac), edited by Krsto Spoljar and Miroslav Vaupotić (Zagreb, 1966).
[5] Tomislav Ladan, Pjesništvo, pjesme, pjernici (Poetry, Poems, Poets) (Zagreb, 1976), p. 72.
[6] Miroslav Vaupotić, Hrvatska suvremena književnost. Contemporary Croatian Literature (Zagreb, Croatian PEN Club Centre, 1966), p. 75.
[7] Journal of Croatian Studies, XIV-XV (1973-74), p. 126-33.
[8] Damir Prebeg, O piscu Zlatku Tomićiću (Zagreb, 1979), p. 4.