“Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted”. Vladimir Bartol’s Novel “Alamut” – Belated Entry in the Modern Balkan Context

Author(s): Malamir Spasov / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2015

“Alamut” (1938) is a novel by Vladimir Bartol (1903 – 1967) – Slovene author from Trieste. It has been defined as both “marginal literature” and “brilliantly written work”. However, only in the 1980s and 1990s Bartol’s novel became the most internationally successful and bestselling work of Slovene literature, partly due to its strangely contemporary relevance. And yet there has been surprisingly little comparison between “one of the most original works of Slovene literature” and the modernistic literary creativity of contemporaries of Bartol’s generation elsewhere in Southeast Europe – for instance authors such as Bulgarian Boris Shivachev, Romanians Camil Petrescu, Anton Holban and Mircea Eliade, and even Serbian Miloš Crnjanski. Regrettably, “Alamut” is not translated in Bulgarian or Romanian yet. Apart from the fact that it is a gap which needs to be filled, such a juxtaposing seems to be quite alluring, loquacious and valuable. This study represents an attempt to commence similar comparison and to initiate a broader discussion between both extremities of the Balkans.

Wina bez prawa. Struktura nowej iluzji

Author(s): Andrzej Leder / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2 (7)/2015

Basing his argumentation on Freud’s essay “Civilisation and Its Discontents”, the author poses a question about the essence of suffering which appears when the Law of the Father is suspended and no longer protects against the death drive. The author formulates a thesis that in the contemporary social space, abandoned by the Law of the Father, it is disciplinary practices that play a key regulative role, pretending to form the relations based on the law. These practices transform the drive energy of Thanatos, which then finds its embodiment in the everyday lifelessness of bureaucracy, the coolness of rules and the excess hidden beneath them. The answer to this situation is Eros, which drives people to community – yet not so much in the form of a family as of an infinite and noneconomic continuum of local games of love and death.

Преоткриване: Супрасълски сборник, старобългарски паметник от Х век/ Rediscovery: Bulgarian Codex Suprasliensis of 10th Century

Author(s): Dilyana Radoslavova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 25/2012

Rola Instytutu Mikołowskiego w upowszechnianiu przekładów literatury słoweńskiej w Polsce w ostatnich latach

Author(s): Monika Gawlak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2016

This article focuses on the dissemination of Slovenian literature in Polish by the Rafał Wojaczek’s Institute in Mikołów between 2012 and 2015. The author approaches the role of publishers in promoting literatures that are viewed from the Polish perspective as marginal using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields. She points to the mechanisms and motivations of both the publisher and the translators, addresses issues related to graphic design, and examines the impact of paratextuality.

Književnost i umetnost u Jugoslaviji: (DIS)KONTINUITETI (1918 – 1992)

Author(s): Jana Gligorijević / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 3/2016

За първи път на български език: "Еротика" на Иван Цанкар

Author(s): Mariya Russeva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2 (4)/2016

What is the Rationale of Periodization?

Author(s): Imre Szíjártó,István Molnár / Language(s): English Issue: 1-3/2003

Literary evolution in Hungary and Poland has had very much in common since the very beginning up to the present, but the division into epochs within each national literature has always been considerably different. Political changes played an important part in distinguishing various epochs of Hungarian literary history in the scholarship. Certain scholars combine the historical periods with literary movements or with spiritual movements. In Polish and Slovenian periodization literary movements dominate. The term Enlightenment and Positivism are also current. The latter corresponds to Realism and Naturalism in Hungarian and Slovenian criticism. The period between 1918-1939 does not have a common name in Hungary and Poland, whereas it is referred to as Expressionism and Social Realism in Slovenia. The comparative periodization of literatures in East-Central Europe can make literary scholars’ views more exact in cases when opinions differ in stating time limits for different periods. Such a comparison may contribute to a more thorough understanding of the “phase delays” that may have occured between these literatures.

Recenzija: Tajno delovanje primorske duhovščine pod fašizmom. Primorski krščanski socialci med Vatikanom, fašistično Italijo in slovensko katoliško desnico - zgodovinsko ozadje romana Kaplan Martin Čedermac

Author(s): Nevenka Troha / Language(s): Slovenian Issue: 1/2003

The review of: Egon Pelikan: Tajno delovanje primorske duhovščine pod fašizmom. Primorski krščanski socialci med Vatikanom, fašistično Italijo in slovensko katoliško desnico - zgodovinsko ozadje romana Kaplan Martin Čedermac. Nova revija, Ljubljana 2002. 776 strani, ilustrirano (Korenine)

Kaplan Ivan Kretič in otroška pesmica v Cerknem leta 1937 ogrožata varnost italijanske države

Author(s): Boris Mlakar / Language(s): Slovenian Issue: 1/2000

Based on archival documents, the most important being a preserved file in the fond of the Gorizia police office, the author, using the example of the parish priest Ivan Kretič in Cerkno, vividly presents a story illustrating the confrontations such as were typical in the 1930s between the Italian Fascist authorities and the Slovene clergy in the Primorska region. Kretič, by using the Slovene language and teaching his congregation national songs, which was seen by the Italian authorities as a deliberate attempt to hinder the Italianisation of the region, elicited a strong reaction from the entire Fascist ruling and repressive apparatus from Cerkno to Gorizia. Kretič managed to avoid punishment only by a hair's breadth. Yet because he continued with such and similar activities after he was transferred to the parish of Kojsko, he was sentenced to two years of confinement in southern Italy in 1939.

Oktobrska revolucija in slovenski književniki

Author(s): Franc Zadravec / Language(s): Slovenian Issue: 1-2/1967

Dans cette atmosphère d’élan général de libération nationale après 1918, personne ne fut surpris de voir que les hommes de lettres Slovènes étaient plutôt en faveur de la révolution d’octobre. Si nous faisons abstraction du poème de Valerijan Brjusov »Révolte« écrit en 1905 et publié dans la revue »Ljubljanski Zvon« (La Cloche de Ljubljana) dans son numéro de mars 1918 dans la traduction d’Ivan Prijatelj, trois écrivains Slovènes qui avaient été en Russie au moment de la révolution d’octobre mais étaient bientôt rentrés dans leur pays contribuèrent le plus à interpréter les événements d'alors. Pavel Golia, Josip Vidmar, Vojeslav Mole. Un des interprètes les plus éminents de la révolution était le poète et publiciste Fran Albreht, mais son esprit révolutionnaire faiblit après 1920. Les idées de la révolution d’octobre ne laissèrent pas de troubler certains écrivains catholiques p. ex. Stanko Majcen et Jože Piber. Un groupe d'écrivains dont les plus en vue étaient Govekar, .Vladimir Levstik et Ivan Tavčar tentait consciemment de minimiser T importance de la révolution. La Yougoslavie bourgeoise, par le fameux »obznana« (1920) et la »Loi sur la sécurité de l'Etat« (1921) empêcha la création d’une feuille littéraire qui se serait appuyée sur T idéologie marxiste et aurait groupé autour d'elle les écrivains d’orientation marxiste et leurs sympathisants. Mais ils eurent à Trieste deux organes, surtout rédigés par Vladimir Martelanc. Malgré tout, chez de nombreux poètes et prosateurs, les thèmes sociaux et révolutionnaires restèrent à la base de leur inspiration; Tone Seliškar, Mile Klopčič, Srečko Kosovel, Lovro Kuhar, Ivan Vuk, Rudolf Golouh, Bratko Kreft, Juš Kozak et d’autres.

Pogledi slovenskih marksistov na književnost (1919 — 1941)

Author(s): Franc Zadravec / Language(s): Slovenian Issue: 1-2/1967

L'histoire littéraire Slovène n’ a pas encore étudié en détail la participation des marxistes à la critique littéraire comme aux théories littéraires de l’époque entre les deux guerres. Cependant, ce qu’ on a, d’une manière générale, déjà constaté, c'est que les jugements des marxistes sur les questions littéraires et esthétiques durant la première décade après la première guerre étaient, la plupart du temps, d’occasion. Il faut cependant faire exception pour Vladimir Martelanc et Bratko Kreft dont les vues ont été systématiques et se sont aussi appuyées sur les idées des classiques du marxisme. Dans les années 30, le nombre des intellectuels marxistes a augmenté, et cette nouvelle vague apparaît dans l’étendue et la force théorique de la publicité littéraire. A la fin de 1932, les marxistes Slovènes fondèrent la revue »Književnost« (Littérature) où s’affirmèrent surtout dans la critique littéraire Dušan Kermavner, Bratko Kreft, Ivo Brnčič, Boris Kidrič, Edvard Kardelj, Boris Ziherl. Lorsque en 1935 cette revue cessa de paraître, ces critiques, surtout Ivo Brnčič et Tomo Martelanc continuèrent pendant quelques années encore à écrire des critiques et des essais littéraires.

Травелоги югославских писательниц первой половины ХХ века: в поисках идентичности

Author(s): Anna G. Bodrova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2019

The paper considers travelogues of Yugoslav female writers Alma Karlin, Jelena Dimitrijević, Isidora Sekulić, Marica Gregorič Stepančič, Marica Strnad, Luiza Pesjak. These texts created in the first half of the 20th century in Serbian, Slovenian and German are on the periphery of the literary field and, with rare exceptions, do not belong to the canon. The most famous of these authors are Sekulić from Serbia and the German-speaking writer Karlin from Slovenia. Recently, the work of Dimitrijević has also become an object of attention of researchers. Other travelogues writers are almost forgotten. Identity problems, especially national ones, are a constant component of the travelogue genre. During a journey, the author directs his attention to “other /alien” peoples and cultures that can be called foreign to the perceiving consciousness. However, when one perceives the “other”, one inevitably turns to one’s “own”, one’s own identity. The concept of “own – other /alien”, on which the dialogical philosophy is based (M. Buber, G. Marcel, M. Bakhtin, E. Levinas), implies an understanding of the cultural “own” against the background of the “alien” and at the same time culturally “alien” on the background of “own”. Women’s travel has a special status in culture. Even in the first half of the 20th century the woman was given space at home. Going on a journey, especially unaccompanied, was at least unusual for a woman. According to Simone de Beauvoir, a woman in society is “different /other”. Therefore, women’s travelogues can be defined as the look of the “other” on the “other /alien”. In this paper, particular attention is paid to the interrelationship of gender, national identities and their conditioning with a cultural and historical context. At the beginning of the 20th century in the Balkans, national identity continues actively to develop and the process of women’s emancipation is intensifying. Therefore, the combination of gender and national issues for Yugoslavian female travelogues of this period is especially relevant. Dimitrijević’s travelogue Seven Seas and Three Oceans demonstrates this relationship most vividly: “We Serbian women are no less patriotic than Egyptian women… Haven’t Serbian women most of the merit that the big Yugoslavia originated from small Serbia?” As a result of this study, the specificity of the national and gender identity constructs in the first half of the 20th century in the analyzed texts is revealed. For this period one can note, on the one hand, the preservation of national and gender boundaries, often supported by stereotypes, on the other hand, there are obvious tendencies towards the erosion of the established gender and national constructs, the mobility of models of gender and national identification as well, largely due to the sociohistorical processes of the time.

Slovenian Neo-Avant-Garde Visual Poetry

Author(s): Lucija Mandić / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

This article typologizes visual poetry of the Slovenian neo-avant-garde. The Slovenian neo-avant-garde, which flourished roughly from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, was closely connected to student movements on the one hand, and to new theoretical and philosophical currents on the other. Young authors thus tested the boundaries of literary discourse and experimented with new artistic practices, such as happenings, performance, multimedia projects, land art, and so on. In so doing, they drew heavily upon the artistic and literary practices of the historical avant-garde, which again gained popularity at that time as well. Although the intertwining of the verbal and the visual in literature in the 1960s was not new, it reached new dimensions with the development of conceptualism.

O prvim novinama južnih Slovena

Author(s): Vladimir Osolnik / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 3/2011

The present contribution offers information about the Slaves and the cult for history in the second half of the 19th century in the south-Slavic printed works, books, magazines, chronicles, and it also provides us with information regarding the appearance of the new media; regarding history, nation, language and literature in the following magazines: Slavenoserbskij magazin, to jest sobranie raznih soţinenij i perevodov, k polze i uveseleniju sluţašţih; Novine serbske iz carstvujušţeg grada Vijene, Novine srbske, Zabavnik; Kmetijske in rokodelske novice i Kranjska ţbelica; Novine horvatske, slavonske i dalmatinske i Danica Ilirska; Letopis Matice Srpske and Danica written by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić.

PITANJA IDENTITETA U TRILOGIJI O BOSNI VALERIJE SKRINJAR-TVRZ

Author(s): Vildana Pečenković / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 21/2022

The paper questions the construction of identity in the novels of Slovenian-Bosnian authoress Valerija Skrinjar-Tvrz: Na svojoj, na plemenitoj, Jutro u Bosni and Bosna i Soča, which were combined and published as a trilogy this year. Integrating the period of medieval Bosnia, the First World War, and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992-1995 into one whole, the trilogy achieves multiple coding. Although distant in time, driven by different motivations, and intersected by different ideologies, wars shape the lives of the heroes of this trilogy. In this unique poetic entity, the authoress managed to show the complexity of common life through individual destinies and “small stories” and to deconstruct the conception that history is made up of “big stories”. The identities of individuals in the novels represent the identities of communities whose borders are porous and threaten to destroy the established systems, while individual unfortunate destinies are a mirror of collective traumas from the Middle Ages to modern times. The Trilogy covers almost the entire Bosnian history, trying to include identity constructions and their associated identification features, which the authoress considers representative of contemporary identity re/configurations.

COMPARISON OF GRAPHIC AND TEXTUAL BIOGRAPHIES IN SLOVENIAN LITERATURE

Author(s): Ana Toplak / Language(s): English Issue: 21/2022

The paper compares two graphic biographies with traditional biographies of the same authors – renowned Slovenian writers Alma Karlin and Ivan Cankar. It compares the manner in which graphical and text-only biographies present the characters, the character’s emotions and expressions, which life events they emphasize, and how they address the criterion of objectivity. The results suggest that the biographies in the two Slovenian graphics are less objective than textual biographies due to the pictorial material. Textual biographies present more information about the subject, while graphic biographies focus more on individual events, statements, and emotions, and present them more appealingly.

Tko se, zapravo, boji Milene Mohorič? Biografija revolucionarke u postsocijalizmu

Author(s): Natka Badurina / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2019

The paper will examine narrative and nonfiction works by Slovenian author Milena Mohorič, characterised by her interest in the position of women in bourgeois society between the two wars and by her commitment to women’s rights within the communist movement. Her partly autobiographical novel Korenove Saše učna doba (1940) will be analysed, particularly as regards the debate between liberal feminism on the one hand and the socialist fight for women’s rights on the other. The tragic events of her life are the subject of the recent biographical novel Če delaš omleto (2014) by Slovenian author Lado Kralj. Kralj’s novel refers directly to Korenove Saše učna doba, but also continues the chronological line of the story, depicting the author’s misfortunes during the purges of the Jugoslav Communist Party. The main female character and the narrative procedures in Kralj’s novel (humour, heteroglossia, elements of the fantastic, the relation between the fictional and the documented) will be the matter of an examination. Futhermore, the relation to historical events and the comparison of Kralj’s novel with Mohorič’s fictional and nonfictional texts will be discussed in order to see if Kralj’s novel may be considered as stimulating or limiting mediator in remembering women’s historical trauma.

Kronotop egzila u postjugoslavenskom romanu

Author(s): Miranda Levanat-Peričić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2019

Although the chronotopic approach to the novels of exile is almost self-explanatory, certain specifics expressed by post-Yugoslav exile narrations evoke a separate chronotope interpretation. First and foremost, post-Yugoslav literature is additionally encumbered with the identity issue because the abandoned areas of the nineties for the exiled writer do not disappear at a metaphorical level, by turning into a mnemotope, but in the actual break-up of the political entity, the imaginary supranational heritage transforms itself into a kind of counterculture, mostly affirmed by exile writers. Therefore, returning to the abandoned place often becomes possible only as a return to the past. In this paper, the literary theme of exile will be followed comparatively, starting from the reflective nostalgia in the prose of Dubravka Ugrešić (The Ministry of Pain), through a global exile which reflects the history of the relationship between European persecutions and America as an unfair homeland, which breaks all identity support in the novels of Aleksandar Hemon (The Nowhere Man; The Lazarus Project), to the intra-Yugoslav, “hereditary” exile in the novels of Goran Vojnović (Chefurs Raus!; Yugoslavia, My Homeland), which fathers left to their sons like a curse of the genus. In the texts mentioned above, the chronotope of exile is dealt with at the level of genre, as the major, supreme chronotope, which includes or opens space to a series of specific local chronotopes, which are fundamental to exile narration. These motifs are also encountered in other genres, but in exile narration they are the bearing pillars of the genre. They are, by their nature, chronotopic because they are realised through the binary spatial-temporal categories of presence and absence, affiliation and non-affiliation, anchoring and nomadism. In this paper, I will look at three such chronotope motifs: 1) the motif ofhome as a non-place or a place of absence; 2) the motif of other/mirror country and other/“mirror” history; 3) the motif of return and travel (by train), which regularly invokes the stereotypical representation of the place and the past.

СОВРЕМЕНИ БОГОМИЛСКИ ИЛИ НАРОДНО-БОГОМИЛСКИ АВТОРИ И ДЕЛА

Author(s): Slavčo Koviloski / Language(s): Macedonian Issue: 15/2023

In this study we refer to the phenomenon of piety and its influence on literature and philosophy by this day. Starting from the term “folk-Bogomilan” poetry, first used by Kocho Racin, we present observations about the possibilities of emergence, even if spontaneous and not formed completely, of contemporary folk-Bogomilan authors, i.e. contemporary folk-Bogomilan literature. Hence, we terminologically upgrade Racin's position on folk-Bogomilan poetry with folk-Bogomilan or contemporary Bogomilan authors who have a distinctly social creative dimension. Such authors, for example, apart from Racin, are August Cesarec, Miroslav Krleza, Hristo Botev, Ivan Cankar, etc. These were authors who were “a thorn in the side of all conservative people”, who brought a “new spirit, art and life” into their works and who found themselves in conflict with the social systems of the time, i.e. the rule of “being Bogomil meant living outside the law, without the protection of any earthly authorities they were surrounded with” applied to them. In their works we should look for a reference to the old times, to denying and fighting against the existing social, religious and economic systems, to a demand for social justice, to dualism, etc.

Die schwere Geburt einer slowenischen Zeitschrift im Krain des Vormärz

Author(s): Mira Miladinović Zalaznik / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2023

The pathway to founding a Slovenian periodical in the Habsburg monarchy of the mid-19th century was a long one. It took five years of effort by patriotic individuals who, in 1843, launched a newspaper for farmers and craftsmen: Kmetijske in rokodelske novice [Agricultural and craft news] rather than the political or cultural periodical that they hoped for. The publicist Leopold Kordesch, the printer Josef Blasnik, the state governor of Carniola Joseph Camillo von Schmidburg and Archduke Johann worked to bring it into being. In the cultural consciousness of the Slovenes, however, the spiritual father of this publication is the veterinarian, and secretary of the Carniolan Agricultural Society, Johann Bleiweis, who was the paper’s editor for decades after 1845. He introduced a consistent form of Slovenian writing, promoted the improvement of the general knowledge of his compatriots, and influenced their political orientation at a time when this newspaper was the only authorized periodical in Slovenian language.