The Image of France and Paris in Jovan Dučić’s Prose

Abstract

The paper examines the way in which a particular image of France and Paris is created in Jovan Dučić’s travelogue and essay prose. First, it tackles the historical and political context of the relationship between Serbian intellectual and cultural environment and France, i.e. the West. This research sheds light on the nature of that relationship during the period from the end of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century following the significance of the French cultural and artistic area for Serbian writer and poet Jovan Dučić. The path of his culture and education represents an important perspective in this analysis, because Dučić proves himself to be an excellent connoisseur of the classical ancient heritage, as well as later eras of literary history and modern (Western) literary thought. The paper focuses on selected essays from Dučić's books A Path By the Road and My Companions, the travel essay “Letters from France“ from the book Cities and Chimeras, as well as the places of reflection on France and Paris from the Emperor Radovan’s Treasure book. Dučić creates a special image of France and Paris as an exceptional space of culture, spirituality and art. This image is in accordance with the socio-political relations of the two countries at that time, but also the literary and artistic pretensions of Serbian intellectuals. The essays in which Dučić speaks about his contemporaries and friends, and  newspaper articles where he deals with the topics of literature, literary education and reading are proof of it. He demonstrates his pro-Western orientation and the French cultural model by writing about the generational changes in Serbian literature, the relationship between contemporary generations and their predecessors, the personal libraries of Serbian intellectuals to which books arrive from Paris, etc. What France and Paris represent becomes a measure of taste, artistic quality and duration, according to which Serbian culture and art are also assessed. Dučić’s France is a civilizational and cultural model, whereas according to him, Paris is the cultural center of humanity, the successor to ancient Athens and Rome. These are the foundations of modern identity – a special space of culture and education of the spirit. In such a picture, the objective and factual are reduced to a minimum and give way to reflection and lyrical expression, in order to develop a more suggestive and colorful representation of this space. The paper shows that the Paris from the travelogue is not equal to the real, everyday Paris Dučić visited. It is a city-symbol and a city-idea, in which the elements of the industrial city, the world of trade and the material are removed from the image, and a travelogue image of a humanized political city of culture and institutions that guarantee civilizational foundation and continuity is constructed.