NJEGOŠOLOGIJA – NEPROLAZNI IZAZOVI NOVIH TUMAČENJA NJEGOSHOLOGY - AN IMPERISHABLE CHALLENGE OF NEW INTERPRETATIONS

Abstract

Science has not yet written the last word when it comes to the complexity of the work and personality of Peter II Petrovic Njegos. His existence marked a short segment of Montenegrin history (1813-1851), but he established himself as an inviolable beacon of Montenegrin and South Slavic cultural heritage. The cultural-memorial reflection of Njegoš's oeuvre must include considerations at various levels. It embraces the role that his texts and political activity play in the formation of the national tradition, the relation of fictional discourse to the national past, the relation of the literary text to the cultural constructions of national identity, consideration of the representational role of the literary text as a constitutive part of the culture as a whole, problems of critical and historical literary canonization, etc. On the one hand, interpretation of Njegoš's legacy allows us to get a complete picture of the peculiarities of his poetic code. On the other hand, it enables us to see his work as a cultural-memory matrix without which it is impossible to imagine the coordinates of Montenegrin cultural identity. Within such research, the uniqueness of what was said gains its entire meaning through a network of attitudes towards language, tradition, ideology. On the intersections of these networks are projected many symbols fused into a matrix of timeless paradigms, i.e., all ethical, aesthetic, poetic categories and identity patterns contained in the whole of Njegoš's legacy. Although each of Njegoš's texts represents an ideologically and thematically independent semantic whole, by carefully reading his entire legacy, we come across intersection points, which opens the possibility of chaining the meaning and expanding the reference planes of the semantic constituents of the text.