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Of remarkable interest to psychologists is the little-known but amazing work of genius “People of the Universe,” a story told in four consecutive plays by the Croatian poet Kosor.1 The keynote to the whole tetralogy is sounded in the one called “Reconciliation”
“No one has yet built the ship that will sail to the living God.”
but it is just this that the “people of the universe” for the first time succeed in doing. We see one man sturdier than the rest, rouse himself from the level of the groundlings, and watch him amidst toil and trouble painfully up-build it in “The Invincible Ship”; and watch another fleeing with it to Paradise, in the climax to “The Woman.” The Ship symbolizes a means of escape; escape from the sore and dreary circumstance that it is the burden of the story to unfold; and the Flight is but a flight from reality, and the ship—a ship of dreams.
It is soon evident, however, that his fundamental drama—movingly told in four varying forms of subtlety and speech, each reflecting, elaborating, modifying yet emphasizing the other—dwells not so much on “People of the Universe” as their counterpart, the Immortals of the Skies; the scene being staged, in fact, on a higher plane and with loftier characters and characteristics than at first sight greet the eye. The story is not merely of the petty ambitions and aspirations, shortcomings and catastrophes, personal squabbles or feuds of individual families—everyday folk of the world, people