Janko Polić Kamov
Rebellious by nature, he was expelled from Rijeka high school and dropped out of the school in Zagreb. Because of his participation in the demonstration against the Hungarian governor in Croatia, Khuen-Héderváry, he was sentenced to three months in prison in 1903. Headstrong and temperamental, he called himself Kamov, after Ham (or Kam) from the Old Testament, who saw his father Noah naked but unlike his siblings Shem and Japhet did not cover his nakedness, thus issuing a curse. Kamov probably saw himself as a revealer of bourgeoise hypocrisy and wrote to his brother Vladimir in 1910 - "Kamov to me is a literary program..."
His literary work was small, but very significant, because in his poems and plays he expressed his anger and displeasure over hypocrisy and injustice of his contemporaries in a way unprecedented in Croatian literature. His masterwork is a modernist novel Isušena kaljuža (1906-1909) saturated with psychosexual and spiritual conflicts of the iconoclastic first-person narrator and later described as a proto-existentialist prose, written decades before the literary movement's appearance. Kamov's novel, invariably described as the premier Croatian avant-garde major prose work, was printed for the first time in 1956. Because of that he earned reputation as one of the greatest rebels and iconoclasts in history of Croatian culture.
He died at the age of 24 in Barcelona and was buried at the hospital cemetery near Hospital de la Santa Creu.
“Znao sam stajati na ulici i gledati u mnoštvo, kako se klanja, prolazi, kicoši i previja, i najodurniji mi postadoše ljudi uredni, lijepi i elegantni. "Sve je to pomada, karmin i parfem: parfem za naš njuh, karmin za naš vid, a pomada za opip..." Najantipatičniji mi postadoše mladići; ja sam zaljubljivanje protegao na mladost, glupost i brčiće. Koketiranje mi postade nešto slična karikiranom majmunu, ljubav karikirano koketiranje, a zabave, šetnje i plesovi karikature karikatura. Naprotiv sam zavolio bradate ljude, i sretajući ih pokadšto, ja bih se razmiljio i unježio, kao da sam našao srodnu i plemenitu dušu.Ne. Ja nijesam bio normalan.”
“Ostanite daleko, plava ljubavi - mi cjelivamo trak sunca - i sunce je život, dok mu se ne približimo...”
“To je prštaj, prštaj strasti- vragoljasto, toplo, tečno -što će tresnut pjanim klikom:Sve je krasno, sve je vječno!”
“I kletva grdna, prostačkasve pjesme od tad piše:Psovača tek sam pjesnik jai zasad - ništa više!”
“Lijepa i čista. I blude oči i tihne duša:usnula djeva, što mušku lasku kroz kose sluša,i sve se šire usnice njene i smijeh je hvatako da si prstom tako se lako njenoga vratai onda bliže... pružio usne na njeno čelo,slijepio čvrsto, čvrsto i čvrsto - rumen na bijelo.”
“Ne niče li to ideja? Misli? Mrmore, sukobljuju se, prepiru i ljube i opet množe u beskraj, u vječnost ko živa bića.”