in other Central and East European countries, writers in Slovenia were traditionally invested with the obligation and the attendant risk to act as the keepers of the national flame, guardians of our moral, social, and spiritual values. Specifically, it was the language itself that represented our most cherished national treasure. Why? Because Slovenians lacked full-fledged political, economic, or social institutions that would have helped maintain a sense of national unity. Naturally, this sense tends to be better developed in countries that have—at least historically—attained some form of statehood or another. Slovenians have been less fortunate. They’ve lived under royalist, fascist, and communist regimes, respectively, as they failed to reach a goal to which all European regions aspired: statehood.
But the Slovenian people, its language, and its books were around long before the independent Republic of Slovenia was established. Squeezed in between the Germanic, Italian, and Hungarian cultures, and ruled by often predatory political regimes, the Slovenian language was more or less the only buffer against the threat of collective obliteration. Small wonder that today six thousand books are published annually for and by a tiny population of two million, an industry in which “elite” poetry collections routinely come out in editions of five hundred, while “popular” books of verse may be published in editions of up to three thousand.
The forests that cover more than fifty percent of Slovenia continue to provide raw material for printers, just as the contradictions of its collective life continue to provide material for its literary achievements.
These achievements arise out of processes long underway. The dominant one must be seen in a history that lacks splendid military victories but is replete with linguistic resistance to foreign rule. For all practical purposes, Slovenian history is the history of the Slovenian language. It is a language that, in addition to singular and plural, also uses a rare dual form. In other words, it’s made for intimate, personal, and erotic confessions.
Although written records in Slovenian (sermons, confessions, poems) had appeared sporadically from the eighth century on, these were little more than fragments. It was fifty years of Protestant Reformation that gave Slovenians a systematic orthography, alphabet, and standardized language. The first book in Slovenian appeared in 1550, one of twenty-two that would be written by the father of Slovenian literature, Primož Trubar: a Protestant preacher who had fled to Germany from the religious persecution in his native land. Thanks to his efforts, Slovenians could read the Old and New Testaments in their mother tongue half a century before the publication of King James Bible.
However, after the aggressive Counter-Reformation, it was Roman Catholicism that became the dominant in Slovenia religion. Its entrenchment in our culture was facilitated by the Habsburgs, the Catholic rulers of the Austrian—later AustroHungarian—Empire to which Slovenia traditionally belonged. The Napoleonic regime came between 1809 and 1813. The French instituted the teaching of the Slovenian language in elementary schools, promoting it as the idiom of the middle class to an extent that would have been inconceivable under the German-speaking Habsburgs.
The relentless pressure of Germanic culture and continuous political subjugation made it difficult to envision Slovenia’s survival as a discrete entity. The oft-spoken prediction of the time was that the Slovenians would pass into oblivion as a distinct ethnic community. But early in the nineteenth century, Slovenian literary journals began to be published in Ljubljana, the focal point of modern Slovenian life. National self-awareness reached its predictable peak in Romanticism, neck and neck with other Central and East European peoples.
The work of France Prešeren (1800–1849), perhaps the most celebrated Slovenian poet, best encapsulates the community’s longing for freedom and independence. Admittedly, his work in English translation sounds like derivative Byronism, but for Slovenians, Prešeren is paramount. A free-thinking lawyer, he wrote in German, the Central European lingua franca, as fluently as in Slovenian. Slovenian, however, was more than his mother tongue. It was his language of choice, signaling his political commitment. Prešeren is thus more than a literary icon. He’s the founding father of modern Slovenian self-understanding. He addressed all Slovenians and prompted them to recognize themselves as members of a single community, beyond their attachments to various regions of their largely rural existence.
Prešeren’s “Zdravljica” (“A Toast to Freedom”) is today the Slovenian national anthem. Back in the 1840s, the censors in imperial Vienna correctly identified the revolutionary potential in this poem in which Prešeren called for the unification of all Slovenians and the necessary defense of their independence, up to and including the use of violence, resulting in its being excluded from Prešeren’s one published book of poems. Despite this, and despite the fact that Poezije sold pathetically—a mere thirty-odd copies in Prešeren’s lifetime—he nonetheless managed to accomplish two historic feats: a symbolic unification of the Slovenian ethnicity and the radical invention of its high aesthetic standards. In poems where national and individual destinies blend into a universal message of freedom, Prešeren transformed his mother tongue from a means of expression into the political foundation of national identity.
The disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 compelled Slovenians to make a pivotal choice: either go it alone, a route for which they were ill-equipped, or else seek refuge in yet another collective state—that is, together with the other Southern Slavs (except the Bulgarians). The die was cast. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians became their common home. It was later renamed Yugoslavia.
Its vibrant cultural life reflected the aesthetic trends of Paris and Vienna, Munich and Prague. Literary debates on expressionism, constructivism, and surrealism were, however, imbued with a political hue. This uneasy bond between politics and literature became a question of life and death after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941.
Having lost credibility, the royal family and its government fled into exile. Most, though not all, writers joined the anti-Nazi guerrilla units, the Partisans. They printed their books, newspapers, and magazines in makeshift print shops, set up in liberated rural and forested areas. They organized literary readings, published periodicals, and, by design, engaged in nationalist and communist propaganda.
AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR
The Partisan resistance proved victorious. After the War, several writers rose in the Yugoslav political hierarchy. A renowned poet, a high-ranking partisan and Christian Socialist, Edvard Kocbek (1904–1981) was a minister in the federal Yugoslav government until he fell out of favor. Educated in Slovenia and France, Kocbek was the first to expose the most fiercely guarded communist secret: that the war of liberation was, to a considerable degree, a civil war as well. Simultaneous with the anti-Nazi struggle, a tragic fratricidal war of “reds” (communist-led partisans) against “whites” (Axis-collaborators), took place primarily in and around Ljubljana.
After the War, uniformed collaborationists and their civilian sympathizers retreated to the Allied-controlled southern Austria. The Allies under British command returned them to Yugoslavia. There, up to twelve thousand people were soon thereafter indiscriminately killed by special units of Josip Broz Tito’s communist regime. Against the official imperative of silence, Kocbek’s was a dissenting voice. He publicly denounced this criminal act of wild vengeance. The poet ultimately won over the statesman. Kocbek thus remained indebted to the legacy of Prešeren. Only after a loss of direct access to the mechanisms of power was Kocbek able to tell the complete truth.
In a way, the civil war was a reflection of traditional antagonism between secular liberalism and Roman Catholic conservatism, the two major mental paradigms in Slovenian history. A dangerous though crucial subject, it occupied many writers throughout the communist years, even though it necessitated the use of Aesopian allegories, designed to fool the regime’s censors. The late fifties and the early sixties saw an outburst of creative activity. New literary journals were established. They gradually became strongholds of independent thought, facilitating the growing political dissent that in 1964 exploded in a massive popular
