Jasmin i Frederic Mistral, dos models literaris per a Miquel dels Sants Oliver

Abstract

In 1903, M. S. Oliver published in the Diario de Barcelona the section «Literatura extrangera » (Foreign Literature), devoted to analysing the work of some of the most important European writers of the time. The critics position, which was founded on aesthetic as well as moral and political criteria, was expressed with absolute clarity. On the one hand, he rejected three types of literature that were highly problematic at the time: decadent symbolism, the Russian novel and Ibsens drama, which he reproached respectively for excessive abstruseness and depressive attitudes to life, nihilism and an obsessive tendency to gloat over collective discontent, and rebellious, antisocial individualism. In contrast to this literature, which encouraged existential apathy and an exacerbated individualism, there were two alternatives: first, the invigorating vitalism of certain authors of Anglo-Saxon stock, Emerson and Kipling; and second, two Occitan poets, Jasmin and Mistral, in particular the latter, in whose work Oliver found a succession of literary, ideological and moral values that seemed quite positive: deep-rooted tradition, rather than the superficial cosmopolitanism encouraged by fashion; clarity of expression and concepts as opposed to opacity and moral ambiguity; Latinity as against the aesthetic and philosophical hegemony of northern Europe.