SOURCE: "Krleza's Culinary Flemishness," in Text and Context, edited by Peter Alverg Jensen, et al., Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987, pp. 185-92.

In the following essay, Flaker examines the role and various function of food in some of Krleza's works, particularly Balade Petrice Kerempuha and Zastave.

In his comparison of Krleza's Balade Petrice Kerempuha (The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh) to the poetry of Eduard Bagrickij, Russian poet from Odessa, Zdravko Malic calls one of the chapters of his study I Consume, Therefore I Am, and, consequently, dubs the "point of view from which the world starts to assume the shape of an object of culinary interest" "pantagruelism", after Rabelais, of course, but without reference to Bachtin's chapter Pirsestvennye obrazy u Rable (The Feasting Scenes of Rabelais). "Pantagruelism" is seen as a "caricature of every spiritual interpretation of the world, its materialization in the most drastic form, and thus highly characteristic...