Abstract
Nineteenth-century European literatures witnessed the move from classical to modern writing (Barthes). Whereas the novel as a popular form of modern writing represented the national character of core literatures, peripheries instead grounded their nationhood on the epic as a genre of classical writing. Prešeren’s Byronic verse tale of 1836 illustrates a peripheral “modern epic” (Moretti). Fragmented, ambiguous, evoking the epic tradition, novelistic plot, and world history, it is about the compromise of an epic hero and his renunciation of the national cause. While Prešeren’s poem entered the canon as epitomizing the national “essence,” the first Slovenian novel, which in 1866 came across as a compromise between an international form and local perspective (Moretti’s formula), remained popular without being representative of the nation.
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- 1.
Starting with the panoramic historical outline of the eighth-century religious combats among the Alpine Slavs in Carinthia and Carniola, the narrative zooms on the besieged Carniolan fortress Ajdovski gradec in the vicinity of the Lake Bohinj where the leader Črtomir, the protagonist, resists to the superior Christian army with a small troop of those faithful to the original Slavic religion. In a series of metafictional turns, the narrator reminds his nineteenth-century addressee about the present-day relics of Črtomir’s fortress and alludes to contemporary tensions within the Slovenian nation as well as the Slovenian relation to the German-speaking rulers and the Slavic world. Historically ornate by epic topoi (Homeric simile, the motives of siege and fratricidal battle in a storm, the patriotic address of the commander to his soldiers), the Introduction concludes with the total defeat of the pagan army, with Črtomir as the only survivor.
- 2.
Defeated and alone, his country having been destroyed and subjugated, Črtomir loses the sense of being and finds himself on the verge of suicide at the bank of the Lake Bohinj. A spontaneous memory of his beloved Bogomila, the former pagan priestess on the Isle of Bled, and images of their pre-war romance, however, avert Črtomir from the act of self-destruction and give him some hope of restoring his private happiness. When he finally meets Bogomila again, it turns out that in the meantime she, too, has converted to Christianity and taken vows out of her care for Črtomir. In resignation, Črtomir who has to renounce his erotic love to Bogomila and sublimate his desire tacitly accepts to be baptized at the Savica waterfall. He forever separates from Bogomila and becomes a Christian missionary stationed in Aquilea.
- 3.
For instance, the narrator uses oscillating designations of Črtomir (he is the youngest among the heroes that defend their country and yet “bears the guilt for all this slaying”) whereas motives with a key causal function in the narrative remain untold or ambiguous. The following stanza featuring Bogomila’s radiant appearance below the waterfall and its impact on Črtomir may be interpreted according to Christian symbolism of rainbow or as a phenomenon of natural beauty: “Now out between the clouds appears sunlight, / Whose rays the pureness of their beauty shed; / On Bogomila pale a rainbow bright, / A heav’nly glow o’er her dear face is spread. / He cannot hide his tears which dim his sight; / He thinks the heav’ns have opened overhead, / And that he stands no more in this world’s realm, / So does this vision him quite overwhelm” (Prešeren 1999: 143).
- 4.
See Chap. 5.
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Juvan, M. (2019). A Compromise “World Text”. In: Worlding a Peripheral Literature. Canon and World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_6
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