# Love versus/and/as politics in Miroslav Krleža’s Banquet in Blitva and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts

## TL;DR

The paper explores how love and politics are intertwined in two novels, focusing on how they address gender politics in the context of WWII.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a comparative analysis of Krleža’s and Woolf’s novels through Burke’s dramatistic model and gender politics.

## Key findings

- Krleža’s novel emphasizes love as a central theme rather than political or military motifs.
- The paper identifies formal and thematic parallels between Krleža’s work and Woolf’s Between the Acts.
- The analysis reveals differing approaches to gender politics in the two novels.

## Abstract

When asked by literary historian Predrag Matvejević to express his views on the eventual dramatization of his novel
Banquet in Blitva (the first two books of the novel were published in 1938–39, the third one in 1962, while the English translation of the first two books appeared in 2004), the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža – as if to spite the predominant interpretive lenses through which the novel is read in the critical mainstream (cfr. Malić 1963, Vidan 1964, Biti 1984, Flaker 1993, Žmegač 2001, and Kovačević 2013) – insisted that the dramaturgical bone of such an endeavour should be “the love theme” joining Karin Michelson to the protagonist Niels Nielsen, and not “the officers, revolt, army” and “state parades,” which should remain sheer “decorative motives” (Matvejević, 1987: 207). The paper examines the implications of this claim by placing the analysis of the novel within a double – conceptual and comparative – framework: the first one will permit us to explore Krleža’s novel’s “grammar of motives,” as proposed by K. Burke’s dramatistic model (cfr. Burke, 1945), while the second will return to the already detected formal, thematic and contextual correspondences between the Croatian novel and Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published
Between the Acts (cfr. Čale Feldman, 2008), in order to address the opposing ways in which the two novels deal with gender politics as a neglected aspect of the rationale of WWII.