Federico García Lorca in the Serbian drama

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present the figure of the poet Federico García Lorca, one of the protagonists of the Serbian drama The Holy Apocalypse or the Hanged Muses (Sveta Apokalipsa ili Obešene muze, 1992) by Đorđe Milosavljević (1969). A one-act play based on one of the most famous episodes of the Spanish Civil War, the death of Lorca, was published in 1992, during the civil war in Bosnia, the Serbian author’s homeland at the time. Milosavljević, who describes the absurdity and horror of war (any war) through the example of a famous episode from Spain, does so with the aesthetics of the grotesque, using such means as exaggeration, caricature, contrast, black humour and a linguistic joke. Taking advantage of the spatial and temporal distance that separates contemporary events in the Balkans from those in Spain in the 1930s, the Serbian author shows in his work the effects of war on man and on all areas of his life and activity, especially culture and art.