Ivan Dornik’s Entrance of the Expressionist Paradigm

Abstract

The article focuses on Dornik's novellas and vignettes and attempts to determine the author's thematic and stylistic entry into Expressionism. With the poetics of the inner eye and symbolic-parabolic methods as well as with ethical condemnation of war, wisions, grotesque images, and animal symbolism, they are positiones next to Cankar's Podobe iz sanj [Dream Visions], but at the same time they exhibit a more pronounced transition to Expressionism. Dornik's subject professes a belief in the new man with strong rhetoric who knows the extreme edge of existential psychological, and ethical crises as well as the horrifying personification of objects and nature. Occasionally conspicuous methaphors are sometimes stil beautiful, but mostly outside of the aesthetic of the attractive, they are wrenching and hyperbolic, effective in their visual aspects and use of colour, and turn the characters into animals.