1 DARKO SUVIN On Dramaturgic Agents and Krleža's Agential Structure: The Types as a Key Level (1984, 7,900 words) Fortunately, it is not my task here to present the large and much discussed -- though not at all well- known in English -- dramaturgic oeuvre of Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981), the dominant cultural, literary, and dramaturgic figure that bestrides 20th-century Yugoslav literature like a giant out of Rabelais. 1 I must commit two overlapping sins of omission if I am to speak at article length about his plays: first, presuppose them as known, and discuss only one rarely treated but sufficiently significant aspect in a new light (an analysis which may contribute to dramaturgic theory in general); second, neglect most nuances and possible but not strictly mandatory branchings within my argument, such as a systematic distinction between Krleža's rather differing phases. A brief, handy, and defensible subdivision of Krleža's playwriting might define its main phases according to: 1) the tendency toward expressionism, ca. 1913-1919, producing the plays Maskerata, Legenda, Saloma, Kraljevo, Hrvatska rapsodija, Kristofor Kolumbo, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Adam i Eva, and U predvečerje the early and late plays in each phase are, naturally, less typical of it); 2) the tendency toward Neue Sachlichkeit in the first half of the 1920s, producing the plays Galicija (reworked in the 1930s as U logoru), Golgota, and Vučjak; 3) the return to the Ibsenian dramaturgic model, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, producing the three “Glembayev cycle” plays Gospoda Glembajevi, U agoniji (successfully enlarged by an additional act after the war), and Leda; 4) a coda of largely unsuccessful attempts after the Second World War at syncretic retrospective in a few fantasy plays, the only full-scale one being Aretej. 1. The approach to agential analysis in dramaturgy that I shall develop here, based on a hypothesis explained at some length in other places 2 , requires a more extensive though still very abbreviated premise to my investigation of Krleža. The presuppositions for a theory of agential analysis have a pure Slavic pedigree going back to Russian works from the 1920s, beginning with Propp and the other Formalists, and continuing to Bogatyrev and Jakobson as links with the Prague Circle of the 1930s-40s. Nonetheless, my hypothesis arises out of considerations which were developed later and, except for the Tartu school of Lotman, Uspenskii, etc., not primarily in Slavic languages, but in French and Italian narratology or semiotics. The first question that arises at this point is one of pertinence. Is it useful to employ the complex and sometimes clumsy machinery of (even a non-scientistic variant of) semiotics to analyse such well-known works as a canonical and canonised play or group of plays by Krleža (or, say, by Shakespeare)? My answer is conditionally but clearly positive. Positive, because dramaturgy is, within a cluster of young disciplines such as the theory of literature or of fine arts, one of the youngest and least developed: it cannot afford to refuse illumination of its domain, wherever that illumination originates. Only conditionally positive, because I must concede that the highly interesting cognitive potentials of semiotics have been dominated up to now, at least in dealing with narrative and including dramaturgical agents, by an ahistorical universalism and scientism, a syndrome I have elsewhere called glossocracy (or, if one prefers, linguistic imperialism).