Janko Leskovar romanziere protomodernista

In its first part the paper offers a short reflection on Croatian and South Slavic Moderna as a literary-historical period or stylistic formation and questions the adequateness both of the use of the word Modernism as an equivalent for Moderna and of the use of the syntagma modernist novel in order to refer to long narrative forms of the Croatian and South Slavic Moderna. Then the paper briefly deals with the novels by Janko Leskovar (1861-1949), "Propali dvori" (1896) and "Sjene ljubavi" (1898), as significant examples of the long narrative form of that period, emphasizing some of their most innovative elements (e.g. shorter form, highly destructured endings, inward turn) in the Croatian literary-historical context. Lastly, it proposes both to avoid using the syntagma modernist novel in order to refer to the long narrative form of the Croatian and South Slavic Moderna and to talk about the two works by Leskovar as protomodernist novels. The paper proposes to use the term Moderna as a technicism in Italian language, as well.