Introduction
Blaže Koneski in “Conversations with Koneski” says that “the work of poetry is to look for essential elements in what we can call historical, cultural-historical, national traditions, etc.” (Andreevski, 312). One of its functions is to maintain or re-establish continuity with tradition, as one of the main and most productive social discourses. That function arises from the need of the society to highlight and update the base and roots of its identity, but also for the individual to confirm his or her identity. Furthermore, one of the main factors in this process is the connection with the collective identity, whether at the level of the family, group, community, nation, society or state.
For Koneski, one of the essential characteristics of poetry is the actualization of the word, and we would also add its most significant embodiments, speech and tradition. At the same time, he does not see the poet as a “medium of supernatural forces, a superman, an oracle of providence (Koneski: 287), i.e. the Romantic concept of the poet is foreign to him. In his view, “there are no higher forces behind the poet, but it is the language-creating collective with all of its tradition that incorporates each new creative act in its permanent and unceasing flow” (Koneski: 287). The poet, as a person with a pronounced sensitivity to the needs of his community, perceives that need more clearly both on the individual and collective level, which leads him to express it in his work. As Koneski himself points out, “obviously, there is still something in man that is distinguished by some kind of greater permanence, that constitutes in his inner life, and this comes to the fore in the different stages of his existence in the world” (Andreevski, 310), also “that there is a sphere that we can distinguish as intimate and a sphere in which man is involved as a member of society and the various groups of that society”. (Andreevski, 310)
What we want to point out in our paper is that Blaže Koneski expresses this view in his poetry and formulates it through a procedure that is close to the model of the dramatic personae and the dramatic monologue of Robert Browning, one of the most important English poets of the Victorian Era. We can find another connection in the central role that the genre of the dramatic monologue plays in Modernist poetry, which is closer to the time when Koneski lived. We can see that connection and the genre kinship in his poetic cycle about Prince Marko, the collection of poems The Embroideress and Prologue Hagiographies. However, unlike Browning, Koneski works in quite different social circumstances. In his case, literature or rather poetry is needed to rise to the challenge of the birth of Macedonian society, as well as to help the process of defining Macedonian identity. It was needed to help the suppressed voice of the Macedonian identity to be heard, but also to enable the adoption and adaption of international cultural and literary traditions and values.
Of course, Koneski’s starting point is Macedonian folk poetry, which had to be reconceived within a new framework and in forms that would respond to the demands of the new social moment. Therefore, his poetry represents a space where the voices of the Macedonian people from different historical eras meet and enter into an identity dialogue, Here we can find a range starting from the epic and heroic to the intimate and subjective in the traditional forms of folk poetry, molded into a new modern expression appropriate to the time in which it was created, the period of the establishment of the modern Macedonian state after the Second World War.
THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE
The dramatic monologue is characterized as a hybrid form that breaks the boundaries of the two genres from which it originates: lyric poetry and drama with its monologues and soliloquies.
The very structure and nature of the dramatic monologue imposes a polyaccentedness and multivocality on the monologic structure of the poem. This occurred following the failure of Romantic poetry with its monologic lyrical subject to represent a multi-voiced and multiplied social reality. This is precisely why poetry turned to a different literary genre inherently characterized by polyphony, and one closer in terms of its evolution to poetry than to the novel, and that is drama.
The first characters that appear in the dramatic monologues of Tennyson and Browning (“St Simeon Stylites”, ” Porphyria’s Lover “) in the 1830s are characters bordering on what is considered acceptable, normal and normative. These first monologues seemed to foreshadow and herald the possibilities of this new hybrid genre of the dramatic monologue or monodrama, as this new form was initially designated.
What we want to point out is that this open, fractured and layered narrative structure allows the display of the suppression, division and essentialization that the society performs through its dominant ideology and discourses. This makes the dramatic monologue a very malleable form that can be used for criticism and analysis of society and its pressing problems, conflicts and dilemmas.