Faces of Death

The Conceptualisation of Death and the Grave in Classical Folklore and Folklore of the National Liberation Struggle

Abstract

The grave in the mountain is an archetypal motif, found across the Slavic-speaking area, in a variety of genres (the fairy tale, the oral epic, the ballad, etc.). Deeply rooted in the fundamental matrices of thought and space (the vertical; the mountain/the forest), this motif has a history behind it, which undoubtedly helpt its persistent survival and vitality in all layers of tradition — there are apparent similarities between the hajduk grave in the classic decasyllable epic, the grave of an Italian partisan in the cult song O Bella ciao , and in verses from NOB (Narodnooslobodilačka Borba, the National Liberation Struggle). This latter form of poetry was accompanied in a large part of the corpus by the concept of a happy and defiant death, a specific glorification of dying, whereby a (nameless) individual is sacrificed for the collective good. Even though the older epic poetry was also not a stranger to the concept of dying for the cause (“For the cross of honor and the Christian faith”), in the poems about NOB the ideological focus is shifted from religious faith to the state and the party, and, to a much greater degree than in classical epics, to the cult of the leader. The new thing, however, in the poetry on NOB, which reshapes the attitude towards death, is the large-scale suffering with no chance of resistance, crimes away from the battlefield, mass deaths and graves of the innocent (the children, the elderly and women), all of which were absent from classical poetry on epic battles and wars. What is novel, however, in the verse about the National Liberation Struggle is large-scale suffering with no possibility of resistance, crimes outside the battle, mass deaths and graves of innocents (children, the elderly, women), all foreign to classical singing about epic conflicts (wars), all which is largely reconceptualized the attitude towards death. In verses on mass death pits and death camps, death took on a new shape, and the grave a new form.