THE POETICS OF MEMORY IN PETAR KOČIĆ’S LYRIC AND MEDITATIVE PROSE

Abstract

This analysis of Kočić’s lyric and meditative prose shows that memory is a poetic constant across his entire oeuvre: not merely a theme, but a constitutive procedure that internally structures meaning and identity-based self-understanding. In this more „intimate” corpus, recollection is most often activated by sensory-affective triggers (spring, light, scent), but also by their negative counterparts (fog, darkness, rigidity), which function as a poetics of unstable memory and the threat of forgetting. The past does not appear as a historical fact, but as a return into the present that establishes a diachronic continuity between the subject and the collective and turns what is „remembered” into a measure of the present. Particularly important is that stable connective structures are already discernible here: places and people as embodied memory, as well as performative forms (song, prayer, lament) that do not describe memory but enact and sustain it. In this way, intimate longing refracts into a collective register of freedom, resistance, and national pride, while disillusionment is articulated as an image of apathy and degeneration. Hence, in the epic and dramatic texts the same memorial repertoire reappears in an intensified, explicitly collective articulation: longing is transformed into a public discourse of resistance, and the „memory song” into a language of shared identity and mobilization.