Childhood in Agram

Childhood in Agram (Djetinjstvo u Agramu, Agram being the old name for Zagreb) covers a highly particularised place in Miroslav Krleža’s memoiristic opus. The title reveals his initial fascinations and images from which will develop the colossal opus of this most fruitful of Croatian writers. In this theatrical adaptation of his diary-memoir/confessional prose of Childhood in Agram, as well using material from another work of his, Fragments (Fragmetni), we reconstruct some of these sights in Krleža’s impressive childhood. These Fragments were written in the form of a play and they form an ideal framework for this theatrical adaptation of Childhood in Agram, in which Krleža speaks about his youth with little ideology. Krleža's Fragments takes apart the cliché of idealising one’s earliest days as an all-important form of freedom. His childhood turned the man into a living actor, and his texts into a new theatrical form of magic. That is to say, in his autobiographical prose text Childhood 1902-1903 (Djetinjstvo 1902-03), which originally forms part of his WWII-era diaries from 1942 and 1943 (this part being written in 1942), Krleža notes how one youthful visionary night he replaced the taught Christian creationism with the understood Darwinian evolution: he detheologised his image of humanity and materialised it, which announced a twilight of the gods paired with a pathos for history…