ARBOREALNI ESEJ BORISLAVA RADOVIĆA I BELE HAMVAŠA

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the essayistic (formal), philosophical, phenomenological, and anthro- pological correspondences between the “essayistic (still) life” in the works of Béla Hamvas (his essays Trees, Jasmine and Olive, and Hour of Fruit) and of Borislav Radović (Дрво (Tree), Жито (Wheat), Под платанима (Under the Plane Trees)). While both Hamvas and Radović grapple with Baudrillarian ‘time of objects’, and even though the aforementioned essays are teeming with what in biological terms is actual living nature, in the works of both writers time of objects accompanies the time of essayistic thought, extending from antiquity to the present day. On a thematic level, their inclination towards similar topics – trees, heads (history of art), the truth, metaphysical reality – produces a modern style of writing about nature which contemporary theory places within the framework of nature’s essays. If we were to make a point of the fact that “places and objects are the most important triggers for our “‘remember me’-memory”, as stipulated by Aleida Assmann, then the historical moment intertwines with the phenomenology of what appears to be a simple text about nature. By means of the dynamic that exists between the thematization of living nature manifested in the allegorical polyphony of the tree and the anthropological impulse as the symbolic ‘still nature’, Hamvas’ and Radović’s essayistic writings, even though created at historically speaking different points of intersection, are still drawn closer to each other hermeneutically.