The article discusses how suitable Stanko Vraz is as a Croatian cultural saint and puts Stanko Vraz’s literary work in the context of Slavic and European romanticism. “Cultural sanctity” is aspecific type of civic cultural canonisation at the national level. in peripheral Central and Eastern Europe after 1848, this phenomenon often materialised as a posthumous veneration of lyrical poets of the first half of the 19thcentury. Why, then, did such a unique longlasting celebration of Vraz or any other singular illyrian poet not emerge in the Croatian national movement as it did in the Slovenian with Prešeren, the Czech with Mácha or the Polish with Mickiewicz? the article contrasts the Croatian peripheral romanticism with the earlier romanticism of the English centre and concludes that none of them could produce a romantic writer who would become a cultural saint after his death. the English public sphere had already been developed and recognised Shakespeare as a national literary figure, while the English romantic geniuses rejected the public sphere celebrating individual imagination. those rare Central and Eastern European poets on the feudal periphery who had already articulated the dissenting individualism of the English romantic genius were considered eccentric in their contemporary context, which still had to create a public sphere. therefore, they distanced themselves from a certain public sphere before it was fully formed. Accordingly, the reaction of the burgeoning civil society, which had no solid political binding before the organised national movements after 1848, was also negative. Posthumous canonisation from 1848 onwards, in conditions increasingly close to those in England during the first industrial revolution, often translated precisely this lack of understanding of the poet by his environment into the poet’s unique clairvoyance, which stood as an allegory for his literary genius (which the poet himself, with his bold individualism, already vividly hinted at). this applies to Prešeren as well as to Mácha and to some other poets – but not to the same extent to Vraz, because he played a significantly different role in the comparatively early emerging Croatian public sphere. in comparison to most other Slavic political movements, romantic illyrianism achieved visible successes even before 1848. these successes were due to the collective performance that did not place any key actor – including frequently lyrical Vraz – in a unique position of excessive deviation from the rest of the illyrianaffiliating Croats, a deviation which would, after the actor's death, gradually be translated into his or her brilliant clairvoyance in comparison to the rest.
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