La notte nelle visioni cosmiche di Sibe Miličić

The analysis aims to investigate the night vault in Miličić’s literary production of the Twenties, either in the lyrics (with the collections Knjiga radosti, 1920, The book of Joy; Knjiga večnosti, 1922, The book of Eternity), and in the prose (Borovi i masline, 1926, Pines and olives; Žena i čovek, 1927, Man and woman; More, 1928, Sea), and in the short novel Veličanstveni beli brik Sveti Juraj, 1928 (The magnificent white brig ‘St George’). By looking at the sky and stars, Miličić was driven in a spatial cosmic perspective by the same desire for the infinite of the ancients and children: in his cosmosofic vision, the lyrical subject wants to be one with the substance. The stars, more than celestial bodies or astronomical reality, are mythopoietic and cosmic elements. However, the pantheistic feelings, bringing together men and celestial bodies, seems to crack little by little in prose. The pictorial and descriptive aspect of the sky becomes increasingly sparse, essential, which seems to go hand in hand with a vision of a universe indifferent to events and destiny of man, but also a sign of a prevailing time dimension of the night. The imaginative motion, the ‘rapture’ upward, will be followed by a folding down toward the earth: the stars will no longer be the mark of human destiny, and the interest of the poet over the twenties seems to move from the infinite universe, to the infinite world in his own self and to those natural elements sharing human fate.