LITERARY PORTRAITS OF SLOVENIA

The literary works of Franz Bevk and Drago Jančar reveal to the reader the non-tourist side of the Alpine-Balkan country.

Slovenia is an amazing country, much more alpine than Balkan, at least in the mentality of its inhabitants. Probably the most orderly among the Slavic states, which was lucky enough to have beautiful mountains and access to the warm Adriatic.

Such a comfortable country should have appropriate literature, a kind of book version of “Milka - the Most Delicate Chocolate.” However, in reality, Slovenian literature can be as harsh as the Alps when you find yourself in bad weather. Which is not surprising, given the country’s history, as they say, is difficult.

After all, like many other countries, it has behind it hundreds of years of being part of a foreign empire, involvement in two world wars of the last century, and a rather poor life at a time when millions of people had no time for tourist trips to the sea shores and to mountain valleys.

You can research Slovenian literature (quite fruitful, due to the small number of Slovenians) with the work of France Bevka (1890–1970), to a small extent translated into Ukrainian in Soviet times.

Like his Croatian colleague Miroslav Krleža (ZN.UA wrote about him), France Bevk took part in the First World War, having been part of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor's army in the territory of Ukraine (Galicia and Bukovina).

After graduation, he returned to his native place, namely to the city of Gorica, where before the war he studied to become a merchant. Meanwhile, Gorica, after a series of territorial divisions, already in the post-war period became part of Italy, where young fascism grew and gained strength.

The writer decided to stay in his small homeland and fight for the rights of his Slovenian compatriots with his words, which turned out to be dangerous. He was sent to an Italian prison several times (he will later describe this experience in his works), in 1943 he joined the movement for the liberation of the Slovenian Littoral and Trieste.

However, as a result of the Second World War, it was not possible to return Gorica to Slovenia, or even more so to Trieste to Yugoslavia (as happened with its sister city Fiume/Rijeka). Gorizia finally remained the Italian Gorizia, and the writer moved to Ljubljana, where he lived until the end of his days. Franz Bevk's most outstanding novel " The Vicar Martin Čedermac " (dedicated to the little-known in our country struggle of the Slovenes against the Italian occupation), I hope, will still wait for the Ukrainian translation.

For now, those who are interested will have to look for his works on the secondary book market, where there is a chance to purchase the collection of short stories "A Difficult Step" inexpensively.

From those stories, the reader will discover the Slovenia of a hundred years ago - from the very end of the First World War (the story "Somebody's Child" with a common plot: a soldier returns to his native village after several years of war, and his wife gave birth to another) to the precursor years of the Second World War ("A Difficult Step" about a mother who makes a desperate attempt to free her son from a fascist torture chamber and becomes a witness to a terrible prison crime - apparently, one of those that the author himself saw behind bars).

Interesting parallels with our present can be seen in the story "Farmhouse in the Valley" from the same collection. Italian agents get to the mountain village and tempt the peasants to cut down protected forests for rough money. The felled trees take their revenge, quite expectedly, because the soil and stones of the surrounding rocks no longer have anything to hold, and a devastating disaster descends on the village... It is worth adding that in Soviet times, in addition to the collection "Difficult Step", several children's books by France Bevk were published, but in general his considerable legacy is practically unknown to the modern reader. Unfortunately, the author's biography is not even on the Ukrainian Wikipedia.

On the other hand, the work of Drago Jančar (b. 1948, Maribor) is well represented by at least three modern editions - "The Nameless Tree", "This Night I Saw Her", "And Love Too". Published in 2010 in the excellent "Map of the World" series (Folio publishing house), "The Nameless Tree" opens the reader to an unknown Slovenia. Literally, because the country is famous for its karsts. The very name of this geological formation, which is characterized by the dissolution of rocks by surface or underground water and the formation of a specific relief, comes from the name of the Karst (or Kras) limestone plateau in Slovenia, near Trieste, Italy.

In the book, considerable attention is paid to caves, which can be accessed simply from a beer hall somewhere in Ljubljana, and can be climbed out (if not lost forever) near the sea. However, not only to caves. This is a strange story with the interweaving of two eras - the Second World War, when the Italian invaders, the soldiers of the Royal Yugoslavia and the red "Tito" partisans converged on the small territory of Slovenia, and the peaceful and normalized life of the early 2000s, and several heroes - a boring archivist who is unexpectedly fascinated a real Decameron from erotic stories of half a century ago, which came into his hands through the diary of an unknown Great Lover; as well as a time traveler who gets into the past by climbing a fairy tree and other characters.

The numbering of the chapters is intertwined in the book, and the plot spins into more and more madness, but each of its specific episodes is quite realistic. Here, the experiences of a Slovenian couple in love on Croatia's Long Island during the war in the 1990s are intertwined - they have a honeymoon, and the men of the island - a general mobilization! Also memories of the main character's father, who went crazy after the horrors of the Second World War.

I will not try to describe the difficult plot of the book, I will simply summarize: "The Nameless Tree" opens readers to the same non-touristy, non-glossy Slovenia as the novels of Franz Bevka.

Slovenian literature is not limited to the two authors mentioned here. It is also worth mentioning Borys Pahor, a writer who lived for over a hundred years (1913–2022), a representative of the Slovenian minority in Italy.

His biography has parallels with the life of Franz Bevka - staying outside the borders of "mother" Slovenia, fighting against the Italian fascists (with a stay in several concentration camps).

He was also an older friend of Drago Jančar, whose work he seriously influenced. In 2016, Borys Pakhor's novel "Hard Spring" was published in the above-mentioned "Map of the World" book series, the main theme of which is the same struggle with the invaders and the hero's return to life after difficult wanderings.

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