The Illyrian movement and the interpretation of dreams:Ivan Gundulićin the paintings of Vlaho Bukovac

Abstract

Given the prominent position in the Croatian cultural imagination of Vlaho Bukovac’s 1895 painting of the Illyrian Movement, this article argues that the later accounts of early to mid- 19^th century Illyrian  politics  and  literature  remain  contaminated,  and  structurally  so,  by Bukovac’s  treatment of  the  visual.  This  visual  contaminant  then  points  to  more  general political and cultural practices in Austria-Hungary at the time, including psychoanalysis, not least where psychoanalysis addresses the scope of image and the phantasmatic. Analyzing three paintings where Bukovac takes up the subject of literature cum the phantasmatic alongside Freud’s 1908 study of „Der Dichter und das Phantasieren”, I propose that in both literature serves to indicate the political logic of metonymy or the metonymic logic of the political; furthermore, I show that Freud, unlike Bukovac, fails to sustain this logic precisely in places where he sets out to classify wishes.