The Anima of Laza Kostić

Abstract

“Oh, my darling, darling, my sweet darling”

(Taken from Laza Kostić’s Diary)

The text from Laza Kostic’s poem Santa Maria della Salute is everlasting and changeless but its context regarding the meaning and the poet’s evaluation can be changed depending on paradigms that regulate the relationships between the author and the readers. Diary of Dreams that was kept in French by Laza Kostić, the facts from his life and work are interesting enough even for the psychoanalytic explications of the hidden levels of the poem’s context. This work presents literary and theoretical revelation of Petar Milosavljević in a unique monograph The life of Laza Kostić’s poem Santa Maria della Salute (1981) that corresponds to the Jungian deep psychological analysis of Ivan Nastović in the book The Anima of Laza Kostić (2004).

On the basis of the external textual facts, Milosavljević’s views concerning the role of a woman in Kostić’s poem are formulated in the way that the love toward that young girl is consisted of the projection of Kostić’s Anima – the young mother whom he lost too early, counterbalance and the addition of the mother whom he found in his own wife. Simultaneously, that girl in his poem, as well as in his life, has a role of the muse that inspires him, and the role of madonna, Beatrice, who will take him to another world where the differences of all times are silent. The fact is that the fairy is not only an object of love but also the centre by which the poet defined his answer to the world with which he was faced in his late years.

Milosavljević’s view corresponds with Nastović’s deep psychological revealation of the poem Santa Мaria della Salute. Nastović mentions Hegel’s thought that the truth is a whole and that spiritual life is regarded as a dynamic whole that is consisted of the conscious and unconscious part of the character. In regard to the Jung’s view “the unconscious often knows more and better than the consciousness”, the unconscious never lies in comparison with the consciousness. The dreams of Laza Kostić from his diary of dreams, in the book of Ivan Nastović, The Anima of Laza Kostić, are interpreted for the first time almost a century after they have been written. Psychological interpretation of Nastović provided for the more complete and versatile understanding of the character, the poem of Laza Kostić as well, his love toward Jelena Lenka Dunđerska and Julijana Palanačka, and the revealation of the poet’s anima.

Using the psychoanalytical interpretation of the poet’s dreams Nastović revelaed the additional point where in the author’s opinion there is a longing not for his own but for the archetypical mother as a centre of his faith, and at the same time a centre of the newly found meaning of his life, that prepared him for death and rebirth.

The tension of the unique and unrepeatable poem derives from the philosophical and aesthetic paradigm of Laza Kostić, from the idea of the crossing of life and death that is solved in the poem of heavenly dreams with life after death. After earthly death, the poet was welcomed to the eternal life. Dostoevsky says that there is no a man nor a nation without the brightest idea. And there is only one brighter idea on the Earth, the idea of the immortality of the human sole – all other ‘brighter’ ideas derive from this one. The man’s treasure is not a destructible substance but a delicate, invisible spiritual beauty, the beauty of the soul that Laza Kostić considered and wrote about. That spiritual beauty is revealed and can be seen in the souls of the ones who pray in silence, in the pain that creates a pearl.