Balade 4: Balade Petrice Kerempuha

Already in the title of the work, two disparate concepts are brought into an unusual and characteristic relationship: the lyrical genre - ballad and the literary character - Petrica Kerempuh. Given that the classic ballad includes a tragic vision of the world, closely linked to some tragic event and character that are its subject, creating heightened emotional tension, K. is in line with the title phrase, which includes an extremely humorous character and concept, announced and realized in the work a distinctive type of modern ballad, which is based on a balladesque image and vision of a disturbed and distorted world, and that mundus inversus, the medieval and Renaissance topos of the inverted world, is presented with humor, irony, sarcasm, cynicism, paradox, absurdity and grotesque, where the poetic realization is at the same time the negation of that world and its biological, spiritual, social and historical organization. Thus, the author's character and form of a new lyrical genre was created, which possesses all the characteristics of an anti-ballad, and with these characteristics, it is included in the modern and modernist tendencies of European and Croatian lyrics in the 20s and 30s. This constant of Krleža's ballad is also confirmed by its poetic commitment manifested by the author's humanist protest against inhumane phenomena and forms of life, regardless of which time and social sphere he belonged to.