The Master of Insomnia. Boris A. Novak

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 protest.

      The communist leaders put these demonstrations down, banned the magazines, and arrested several people, including Tomaz Šalamun (1941–), who is today the most internationally admired Slovenian poet. At the time, however, he was a fledgling enfant terrible with many parodies of canonical patriotic poems to his credit. Šalamun’s talent for poetic absurdity, irony, and playfulness made it possible for him to declare, following his spiritual godfather Arthur Rimbaud, that all dogmatic tradition is the “game . . . of countless idiotic generations.” His contested emancipation of verse from under the shackles of obsessive, single-minded nationalism had far-reaching consequences for the nascent autonomy of Slovenian writing.

      As a result of the political clampdown, the writers of the ’70s retreated from the public arena to rediscover “language as the house of being.” They explored the limits of lyrical and narrative techniques, the vertigo of linguistic transgressions, the abandonment of coherent plots. In these works, irony and poetic absurdity were employed as protection against, not as a challenge to, the external reality.

      After a decade of passivity, the patience of our intellectuals wore thin. The early 1980s saw the launching of another new magazine, and the reviving of public literary debate. Called—appropriately— Nova revija (The New Review), the poems, novels, testimonies, and short stories published in its pages helped to gradually peel off the layers of institutional lies. The leading poetic voice was that of Dane Zajc (1921–2005), a doyen of dark premonitions. The horrors of Titoism, a political system then much admired among the Western left, were laid bare.

      In the larger Yugoslav state, Serbian political appetites began to be seen as a threat to the other nations in the federation. The communist-dominated Serbian government took over the federal administration, appropriated more than half of the federal hard currency reserves, attempted to alter the educational curriculum in favor of Serbian authors, and imposed brutal apartheid on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Slovenia called for a political cohabitation that would satisfy the constituent nations but retain the Yugoslav frame. The increasingly arrogant Belgrade authorities, alas, glibly dismissed the possibility of compromise. Slovenia had to choose: either remain under the heel of a corrupt communist authority or establish an independent state.

      Following passionate public debates, writers led the democratic opposition in drafting the declaration of Slovenian independence. Stimulated by such actions, even the Slovenian communists began resisting the centralized government in Belgrade. After a public referendum, the independent nation-state of Slovenia was declared in July 1991. The Ten-Day War ensued. Despite the shortness of the conflict, it was by no means small: it spiraled into brutal excesses that engulfed the entire region, and hostilities still simmer beneath the surface of the ex-Yugoslav states, despite the Dayton accords in 1995 that nominally ended the wars for Yugoslav succession.

      But now, at last, back to Tribuna. Tito, the undisputed leader of Yugoslavia, died in 1980. The decade between his death and up to the Yugoslav breakup in 1991