Простата и строга македонска песна како современо житие (За „Проложните житија“ на Блаже Конески“

Abstract

While working on the so-called “Stanislav’s Prologue” from 1330, and after writing an entire study on the language in this prologue, an exceptional thought crossed Blaže Koneski’s mind: “...why hagiographies are written only for the prominent ones, and cannot be written for ordinary people.” (Andreevski, 2020: 250) Thus, learning from the hagiographies of persons who had a special status in the religious, church tradition, he decides to share with the reader the urge to write his so-called prologue hagiographies of people with invisible halos, who “...no one declares martyrs. No one declares saints.” (Andreevski 2020: 251) This is how his famous “Prologue Hagiographies” is created, dedicated to certain seemingly social outsiders - people from his surroundings who left an impression on him or for whom he heard stories in his family tradition. For Koneski, they are a true inspiration because they bore the mark of some greatness. In this poetic act in which, unlike the medieval pattern, there is no insistence on hyperbolizing glorification through the codes of the miracle, the miraculous and the fantastic, those personalities are elevated to the level of new (non-canonized) saints and martyrs. As a secular author, without being burdened by what religious texts require, he returns to the source (secular hagiography) and creates new, contemporary hagiographies. Significantly deviating from the medieval model, Koneski achieves a hybrid, cohesive poetic unification of elements from the original tradition of the hagiography genre with the modern expression of the simple and strict Macedonian song, in a contemporary chronotope. In this way, he shows that with such a creative-thought venture, this genre can come to life as non-cliché and nonanachronistic, with new dimensions and in a new form, in a contemporary literary and cultural context.