Princip ili Ferdinand? Mori Ogai o početku Prvog svetskog rata

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show a new interpretation of the poem “One Man” by the Japanese writer Mori Ogai (1862-1922), which concerns Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of World War 1. This poem has been interpreted as Ogai criticizing Princip’s actions. However, by analyzing Ogai’s allusions more closely, we concluded that Ogai is not criticizing Princip, but Franz Ferdinand. This paper makes the case that the poem “One Man” is to be interpreted within the framework of Ogai’s “distancing from Europe” in his literary work, and that the distancing in question happened precisely as a result of World War 1. At the same time, this paper shows the importance of studying Ogai’s work in Classical Chinese, which has been almost neglected thus far, and indicates that this body of work is capable of giving us new information where Ogai’s writings in vernacular Japanese do not.