Zdravko Malic's Gombrowicz

The article is about Zdravko Malić, the first Croatian Polonist in a restricted sense, and the authentic interpreter of Polish literature whose doctoral dissertation "The literary work of Witold Gombrowicz", defended at the University of Zagreb in 1965, marked the turning point in the history of Gombrowicz's reception. Drawing attention to the immanent literary values of the author's work, Malić considerably encouraged the further development of the so called gombrowiczology in Poland and abroad. The article also shows that in the chronology of Malić' s engagement in Gombrowicz, which is being reconstructed from Malić's texts, the interpreter's starting point is Croatian not Polish literary mainstream, the negation of every ideology, human stupidity and absurdity which appears in the works of Miroslav Krleža in the 1930-ies. At the same time, looking back at Malić' s works shows how he gradually transcended the radicalism of Gombrowicz's critique of man and society, culture in general, in which process the "turning" to poetry as the essence of literature (and the essence of humanism) played a decisive role. This is being argued in the context of the interpreter's later preoccupation with the work of young Adam Mickiewicz. Although Gombrowicz as a "proof-reader" continued to be a part of Malić' s dynamic picture of world and literature until1990-ties