Jerolim Kavanjin

Jerolim Kavanjin

Jerolim Kavanjin (February 4, 1641 – November 29, 1714), was a Croatian poet from Dalmatia.

He was born into a wealthy and noble family of Split, as a descendant of Croaticised Italian family of Cavagnini. Kavanjin rose to prominence at the same time as Ignjat Đurđević: at the beginning of the 18th century. In his summer mansion on Sutivan, on the island of Brač, where he retired after military and legislative career, he unleashed his poetical genius to write the most voluminous poetical work in the whole Croatian literature (approx. 32 500 verses): Poviest vanđelska bogatoga a nesretna Epuluna i ubogoga a čestita Lazara, usually referred to by the later editors, according to the subtitle in the original, as Bogatstvo i uboštvo. This religious-philosophical epic is poetically inconsistent but stylistically marked (it is written, beside Split Čakavian, in Ijekavian–Ikavian Štokavian).

Expressing the spirit of philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries, this "encyclopædia in verses" (Josip Aranza) directs its Baroque spirituality towards the cogitation on life and human essentiality in the dual nature of the human and the divine.

Beside the classical humanistic, Latinate and Italian literatures (Dante), the Bible and other religious writings, and beside the historical authors (Constantine Porphyrogenitus, priest of Duklja, Mavro Orbini), writings of the Old Dubrovnik have constituted the basic Kavanjin's reading list, above others Junije Palmotić and Ivan Gundulić

Kavanjin identified with Slavs and Dalmatia, and John Fine interprets his Dalmatianism not to have been a nationalist notion.^[1]

Kavanijn died in Split, aged 73.

References

• Fališevac, Dunja; Nemec, Krešimir; Novaković, Darko (2000), Leksikon hrvatskih pisaca (in Croatian), Zagreb: Školska knjiga d.d, ISBN 953-0-61107-2