The poetics of the Istrian exodus

Abstract

The Rapallo agreement, signed in 1920, signalled the beginning of Fascist rule over Istria and viae crucix over Islrian youth, especially its intelligentsia whose paths of normal intellectual and spiritual development were (hereby blocked. Drago Gervais, Mato Balota, Zvane Cmja, Ivan Bostjančić and other emigrants, divorced from their homeland, found their creative poetics in exodus. The love of birthplace was a common thread binding them together and lead them to common content-thematic sources and to the "čakavian" dialect as their mode of poetic expression. Far from harbouring any notion of aeslhetisizing their part in a dehumanized reality, the čakavian poets lent the spiritually-barren rural enviroment and its huge mosaic both temporal and spatial coordinates so as to make the Istrian drama recognizable. Their poetics did not derive from a school but developed during their exodus, sprung up from the inner core buried in the soul of die homeless . This enabled them to submerge themselves into the tragic Istrian reality which was shown to be a tapestry of social, national, ethical and other components; it also helped them to discover, underneath the social layers, lyric elements and to incorporate these, as authentic components, into their poetry without any remnants of artificiality. It was because of this that Barac believed their poetry "has a right to existence".