Tuđa žena

The novel A Stranger's Wife (1937) by Ivo Kozarčanin belongs to the psychological-social novel of interwar Croatian literature. In the center is a young painter who, after a stay in the city, returns to the province in search of peace and creative stability, but there he is greeted by a closed and petty-bourgeois environment that does not accept his artistic aspirations.

In such an environment, the painter again meets his former love, a married woman with whom he renews an emotional and passionate relationship. The relationship between the painter and that woman becomes a source of internal conflicts, moral doubts and feelings of guilt, and at the same time deepens his alienation from society and his own environment.

In parallel with the love story, the painter's existential crisis develops. He finds it more and more difficult to find meaning in life and gradually distances himself from the people in the province, who view him through the prism of prejudices and social norms. At the same time, the province is presented as a space of spiritual narrowness, hypocrisy and repressed passions.

At the end of the novel, a feeling of disappointment prevails: neither love for someone else's wife nor returning to his homeland brings the painter inner peace. His character remains marked by loneliness, emotional exhaustion and the impossibility of reconciling ideals and reality.