Parun, Vesna (1922—)

Croatian poet. Born on the island of Zlarin in 1922.

One of her country's most controversial and influential poets, Vesna Parun was born in 1922 and enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Dalmatia until the outbreak of World War II. Her first collection of poems, Zore i vihori (Dawns and Gales), published in 1947, extols her youth, and is considered by some to be her best work, although it was attacked by the Left as too metaphysical in tone and out of step with the prevailing school of Socialist Realism. With this condemnation, Parun became an inspiration to a whole new generation of post-war poets.

Silenced for a time, Parun did not publish another collection until 1955, when she issued Crna maslina (The Black Olive Tree). Over the course of the next decade, she published several more volumes, focusing on personal rather than political issues and detailing a number of blissful but short-lived romantic relationships. Considered the best of these poems are "Konjanik" ("The Horseman," 1962) and "Bila sam djecak" ("I Was a Boy," 1963). In 1971, Parun was once again condemned as reactionary by some Yugoslav literary critics for a series of articles in the Catholic periodical Glas koncila, in which she described and defended her return to Catholicism.

sources:

Bédé, Jean-Albert, and William B. Edgerton, eds. Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 1980.

Buck, Claire, ed. The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. NY: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts