From Popularity and Influence to Cultural Oblivion. The Case of Jagoda Truhelka in Croatian Literary and Cultural History

The aim of the paper is to shed light on the place of the Croatian author Jagoda Truhelka within Croatian literary history. The starting point is the fact that from the position of a very popular writer in the first decades of the twentieth century, recognized as a classic author of children’s literature, in our century she has become almost unknown. We will attempt to find reasons for such a trajectory by relying on several intraliterary but also extraliterary research strongholds, including archival material such as correspondence, re-examining in that context the canon as an aesthetically but also a socially determined system of literary “peaks” and its influence on the formation of collective and personal memory (Assmann, Halbwachs). Through a contrastive analysis of several editions of Truhelka’s The Golden Days, we will attempt to detect the impact of censorship on this short prose collection, considered by many to be her best literary work, and, hopefully point out the possible reasons for today’s problems with the revaluation of a once popular children’s classic. Extraliterary reasons such as purposefully keeping silent about the author’s works and the censorship of new editions have resulted in her disappearance from individual and, thus, also collective memory. Today’s efforts aimed at regaining awareness of the (canonical?) value of her literary work – apart from at the literary-theoretical level – have not achieved much success.