DUBROVNIK BY TADIJANOVIĆ - A SPACE OF INTIMATE IN THE SERVICE OF THE ETERNAL

From the very beginnings of its founding, the city has had a greatsignificance: started as the center of social life, in a diachronic sense ithas become a place of gathering of different centers of power, the publicspace, as well as the space of the private - by weaving collective andindividual memory into it. The latter is recognized in Tadijanović’s Poemsof Dubrovnik, a collection of fourteen poems for which the poet findsinspiration in the Town of Poets, over and over again, during the seventy-years time span. It is the city he loved from the very first moment, butin which he was loved as well, thus he often comes back in his thoughts,linking past, present and future. We have highlighted the four phases ofhis writing inspired by the Eternal City and have related the theme-motivebackground with the poet’s age. It is noticed that, in relation to the youthfuland playful first love, the worries, the enthusiasm and the exhilaration, hislater lyric is pervaded by philosophical concerns about the meaning of life,death, transience and the life’s drab, but he does not therefor diminish theimportance of Dubrovnik. With his first and last poem he creates a kindof alpha and omega of his Dubrovnik opus, signifying Dubrovnik as oneperfectly finished mindset, by its cyclical reminding on the circle and thuson the reproducibility of the life cycle: birth - life - death - rebirth (throughre-readings of poems, in the poet’s case).