Slavia Centralis

Balkanske pokrajine in ženska želja v treh novelah pisateljic s konca 19. in začetka 20. stoletja

Katja Mihurko — 2024-12-18

This article analyses the representation of female sexual desire in the works of three authors set in the Balkans. It is based on the hypothesis that the concept of the Balkans was still in its formation in the 19th century and therefore offered opportunities for the projection of various ideas. As such, it also served as a backdrop for three stories in which the authors (Mara Čop Lenger- Marlet, Milena Mrazović-Preindlsberger and Zofka Kveder) featured three female characters who transcended the boundaries of normative femininity.

Altenberg’s and Cankar’s Constructs of Fragile Women

Jožica Čeh Steger — 2024-12-18

In the Vienna of the fin-de-siecle, Peter Altenberg and Ivan Cankar articulated different variants of the femme fatale and the femme enfant, which were an expression of the literary aestheticism and tabuing of feminism at the end of the 19th century. This paper presents images of fragile women in Altenberg’s collection Wie ich es sehe (1896) and in Cankar’s Vinjete (1899). Cankar frequently shaped the femme fragile in accordance with the decadent aesthetics of sickliness and death, while within the construct of woman-child and her angelic image he also articulated her unbridled erotic nature. Altenberg merged the descriptions of angelically beautiful sexless fragile women and ideal girls of prepubertal age with a programme of healthy life in nature, however, they cannot avoid the male erotic gaze and the transfiguration of his erotic fantasies.

Subject, Ideals and Intimacy: Women’s Poetic Language in the Slovenian Moderna period

Irena Novak Popov — 2024-12-18

The assertion of female literary subjectivity and the representation of intimacy in the Moderna period show a loosening in traditional female roles, which had been normed by the patriarchal, predominantly rural Slovenian society. The present discussion deals with young and educated women poets who, at the beginning of their literary career in the liberal multicultural Trieste, connected around the first Slovenian women’s magazine. With idealised notions of love and personal freedom, their poetry addressed important issues of women’s existence, in both the distribution of economic and political power, and also and above all private issues: self-awareness, (failed) erotic relationships, marriage and motherhood, and the possibilities of personal fulfilment. The most ambitious ones later published their own collections. They, however, remained on the margins of cultural memory, because both literary history and the canon serve solely to confirm the self-identity of a small nation.

Femme fatale in the Dramas of the Imperial-Royal Monarchy: from Wedekind and Wyspiański to Robida and Cerkvenik

Krištof Jacek Kozak — 2024-12-18

The motif of women who with their seductiveness fatally influence men has a long history in the art world but they (as femmes fatales) became particularly distinct as they entered fin de siècle art in Vienna. The characters of F. Wedekind, A. Schnitzler or O. Kokoschka thus became paradigmatic, and their influence spread to the borders of the monarchy, where they were adapted in various ways. While a review of Polish literary works (S. Przybyszewski, S. Witkiewicz, S. Wyspiański) shows that these authors adopted a much less fatal and destructive version of the femme fatale, Slovenia (E. Gangl, A. Robida, A. Cerkvenik), in contrast, developed her most radical – fatal, or even satanic – version.

The Female Voice in Gradnik’s Love Poetry and in Marguerite Burnat-Provins’s Le Livre pour toi

Vita Žerjal Pavlin — 2024-12-18

In several of the poems with a female lyrical subject from Alojz Gradnik’s first three collections (Padajoče Zvezde, Pot Bolesti, De Profundis), a strong erotic desire of a woman is expressed. Female erotic sensuality is also essentially defined in the collection of poems Le Livre Pour Toi (1907) by the French-Swiss writer, poet and painter Marguerite Burnat-Provins, translated by Gradnik and published in 1923 under the title Knjiga za Tebe. It is not to say that this French book had a direct influence on Gradnik’s love poems. The aim of this paper is therefore to make a more detailed inquiry into the existing literary-historical comparison of the literarisation of love by both authors, namely by analysing the concept of love and the position of women in the amorous relationship.

Couples modernes – literarni par v srednjeevropskih modernističnih gibanjih

Lena Magnone — 2024-12-18

The article reflects upon a specific phenomenon within Central European modernism: namely the couple composed of a New Woman and a Decadent. Focusing on Młoda Polska, Mlada Hrvatska, and Česká Moderna, the author presents three cases of literary couples: Stanisław Przybyszewski and Dagny Juel, Vladimir Jelovšek and Zofka Kveder, and Stanislav K. Neumann and Kamilla Neumannová. The findings prove that for a woman, to bond with a member of a literary movement was a way to gain access to the bohemian milieu and, more importantly, to the pages of the flagship magazines and, consequently, literary history.

Kljubovanje materinstvu kot podedovani tradiciji in materinstvo kot odrešitev v delih Božene Víkove-Kuněticke in Jelene Dimitrijević

Ivana Kočevski — 2024-12-18

This paper deals with the dual aspect of motherhood in both the novel by the Czech writer Božena Víková-Kunětická (1862–1934) Vzpoura (1901) and the novel by the Serbian writer Jelena Dimitrijević (1862–1945) Nove (1912). Although they follow a similar poetic direction, these women writers nevertheless have different approaches to depicting the same themes. While Jelena Dimitrijević portrays the situations in both the Turkish and American settings with a sharp eye, focusing mainly on interpersonal relationships and women’s behaviour and integration into society, Božena Víková-Kunětická is more concerned with the concrete problems her heroines go through (e.g. infidelity in marriage, pregnancy out of wedlock, deviation from traditions and socio-cultural conventions). Although the novels Vzpoura and Nove are very different in their artistic and content structure, their common element is the motif of girls growing up at the beginning of the 20th century and their resistance to the expectation of continuing traditional relationships within the family. In both novels, motherhood is experienced as a set of fixed and permitted acts and practises of expected behaviour that must not be violated, but motherhood can also be understood in a broader sense as it relates to the function and role of women in a patriarchal family and a conservative society. In this context, we have tried to identify comparatively similar and different elements that these authors use to describe certain problems (e.g. women’s relationship to tradition, their rebellion, their defiance and the question of their free choice).

Živi, želi, ljubi: pomenska polja intimnosti v slovenski in srbski prozi fin de siècla

Lucija Mandić — 2024-12-19

The present paper analyses emotional and physical intimacy in Slovenian and Serbian prose from the late 19th to the early 20th century using word embeddings. Given the complexity of defining intimacy, we consider a broad range of relationships depicted in fin de siècle literature. The Word2Vec language model identifies eight semantic fields encompassing platonic and sexual relationships, including violence, since it seems to be semantically closely related to sexuality in the analysed literary works. Through a comparative study, notable differences between Serbian and Slovenian prose are established. Additionally, the article examines how these semantic fields manifest in works by male and female authors, providing insights into societal perceptions of intimacy and gender socialization.

Valentin Vodnik, The Illyrian Odes, and Political Censorship

Marijan Dović — 2024-12-19

This article examines the first serious conflict between Slovenian poetry and the imperial authorities in the early 19th century using the example of two “Illyrian” odes by Valentin Vodnik. His “Ilirija Revived”, which was published during the French rule, brought serious problems for Vodnik after the restoration of Habsburg power in Carniola as he was accused of “Francophilia”. Following the Emperor’s decision, he was forced to retire and his poem remained banned for several decades. The present article outlines the dynamics of Vodnik’s relationship with the authorities and explains in more detail how and why he was subjected to political censorship.

Srečko Kosovel and his Hybrid Form of (Constructivist) Diaries

Tomaž Toporišič — 2024-12-19

The article focuses on the phenomenon of the diaries of the Slovenian avantgarde poet Srečko Kosovel, juxtaposing them with the diary entries of his contemporary F. T. Marinetti. Compared to Marinetti’s highly political and extrovert diaries about the birth of fascism, Kosovel’s diary is very intimate, conceptual, and lyrical. It comments the political life, but in a highly specific manner combining poetry, essays and other literary forms. Kosovel’s diaries thus represent an unexplored segment of 20th-century diaries, belonging to a specific avant-garde genre of diary writing, functioning as chronicles of introspection, while also producing an exceptionally original combination of personal and collective memory.

The Image of General Hludov in Slovene Translation of M. A. Bulgakov’s Drama “The Flight”

Natalia Kaloh Vid — 2024-12-19

The article focuses on the analysis of allusions and attributed and unattributed references to the Revelation and other biblical texts referring to the main protagonist in Bulgakov’s drama Flight, the White Guard general Roman Hludov, in the Slovenian translation by Borut Kraševec (2016) from the point of consistency and preservation. The historical apocalypse in the drama is representative of the destruction of the old world, loss of homeland, loss of identity, deconstruction of old ideals and degradation of the human. Intertextual figures that Bulgakov intentionally uses to establish parallels with the biblical prophecy about the end of the world represent an important feature of the drama’s stylistic diversity. If the translator omits them, he deprives the text of one of the key features of the author’s significantly ambivalent style. The present paper investigates how, and if, these features are preserved in the Slovenian translation, and which translation strategies Kraševec used.

Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Clauses Introduced by Slovenian Koli-Pronouns

Kristina Gregorčič — 2024-12-19

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the syntactic environments and the semantic features of clauses introduced by Slovenian koli-pronouns (also known as randomness relative pronouns), and to place them in the broader context of cross-linguistic research. Koli-pronouns express arbitrariness and freedom of choice, and thus introduce clauses that name sets of equally selectable referents or conditions. Depending on the type of complementation required by the superordinate clause, koli-pronouns can introduce nominal or adverbial clauses, functioning as subjects, objects, subject complements, object complements or adverbial adjuncts. They can also introduce disjuncts, which express the speaker’s attitude to the utterance, or conjuncts, which serve to link clauses or larger units of text.

Civil Registers at the Turn of the 20th Century as a Mirror of Language Policy Between the Mura and the Sava River

Alja Lipavic Oštir — 2024-12-19

The analysis of the introduction of Slovene into the registers of the Lavantine diocese between 1870 and 1919 shows that German was replaced by Slovene in 92.4% of parishes as a decision of the same parish priest or that of his replacement. In 7.5% of parishes, German was preserved until 1918/1919 (in the form of a linguistic continuum in towns and parishes along the border or close to the border). Individual deaneries partly implemented a language policy regarding language change, however, the dichotomy of town vs. countryside did not decisive a decisive role. The decisive role was played by the individual parish priest and his national commitment, possibly countered only by his own highly developed multilingualism and language switching in everyday life. In this context, the present research allows also for identifying parallels with the introduction of Slovene into education.

Language Isolation of the Slovenian Language in Immigrant Communities. The Example of the Slovenian Community in Toronto

Tadej Kralj — 2024-12-19

The Slovenian Community in Toronto has existed since the 1950s, when the members of the community began to associate in Slovenian churches (Our Lady Help of Christians, Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Parish), where they participated in activities of various societies and so preserved the Slovenian language that they used when they left their home country. In the new environment, the members mostly used the Slovenian language with their families and within the Slovenian community. Consequently, the language they used did not change in the same manner as it did in the home country. The purpose of the article is to present the isolation of the Slovenian language as a heritage language. In the everyday communication of 1st (and also 2nd) generation members of the community this can be observed in the use of the so called preserved language, namely the use of archaic vocabulary which is no longer used in present-day Slovenia. The symbolic function of the Slovenian language as a heritage language is also seen in the preservation of folk songs and prayer forms as a preserved tradition.

Third Summer School of Slovene as a Second and Foreign Language »Slovenščina na prvi pogled«

Gjoko Nikolovski — 2024-12-19

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