The article addresses Vladimir Bartol’s fluid self-identification in relation to changeable places of his stay in the first decade after the Second World War. The writer’s constant oscillation ...between Trieste and Ljubljana was accompanied by the shift in perspectives (minority/majority) and cultural/linguistic dualities which render the Slovenian literature in Italy with existentialist overtone. Bartol’s return to Trieste problematized his self-understanding not only in spatial terms but also with respect to overlapping temporalities (Habsburg multicultural free port of the past versus the present Cold-War image of the city). Consequently, his stay in Trieste gave way to the extensive personal writing which is also the paper’s main source (autobiography and unpublished fragments of diary). Drawing inspiration from the spatial turn and applying the phenomenological prism of experience of certain places, the author attempts to present Bartol’s self-identification reconfigured in alignment with his post-war existential topography stretched between Central European Ljubljana and Mediterranean Trieste.
Distinctively anti-women views are typical of Bartol's prewar short prose (especially in his narratives from the first half of the 1930s). They were already noticed by contemporary criticism, and ...also by later researchers of Bartol's oeuvre. These types of observations often motivated the judgments that Bartol's writing was gynophobic, misogynistic, and even anti-feminist. An overview of Bartol's diary notes shows that in many ways his personal views on women indeed matched the views of his literary characters. The writer drew his anti-women views from various sources: partly from his personal experience and mainly from the works of authors that were typical in this regard and that he read and often used as a reference (e.g., Machiavelli, Strindberg, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Weininger). Within this context, his friend from his youth and role model Klement Jug was especially important for Bartol. Jug's anti-women positions are somewhat less known, but they were extremely relevant for Bartol. Both Bartol's anti-women views and their main sources can be extensively documented. However, these types of views by the author do not necessarily prejudice the expressiveness of his texts. Based on a detailed reading of the novella Ljubezen Sergeja Mihajlovica (Sergej Mihajlovic's Love), this article shows that Bartol's short prose cannot be understood as a thesis propagation of the anti-women doctrine. True, misogyny is one of the informative components of this text, but it does not appear in isolation; it appears in combination with other components that de-monologize, stratify, and relativize the "message." Through the innovative use of specific narrative procedures, Bartol achieved a problematization of the unambiguous reference of his early short prose, which ultimately also relativizes the power of the anti-women views in it.
The article follows the course of translations of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories in Slovenia. It is chronologically divided into three periods, separated from each other by the two world wars. The ...first period began with the Slovenian translation of "The Black Cat" in 1872. Even though subsequent translations were sporadic and restricted to newspapers and popular magazines, at least thirteen stories appeared in Slovenian before WWI. Over the same period, no scholarly articles about Poe were published; instead, Poe's name was mentioned only in passing in articles about culture for general readers. The situation changed in the period between the world wars. New translations and retranslations of Poe's shorts stories became more common and their quality improved. Unlike before, when most were probably translated into Slovenian via a third language, new translations were based on the original English versions. The emphasis was on Poe's horror stories. At the same time, the first book editions of Poe in Slovenian appeared. In addition, literary-critical articles about Poe and his prose became common. Most of them were written for the general reader; however, they also included a few scholarly articles. The most influential one was the work of a well-known Slovenian prose writer Vladimir Bartol, who held Poe's prose in high esteem and in particular emphasized his unique style and modernity. Bartol's article later had an influence on the reception of Poe in Slovenia in general. After the Second World War, Poe once again gained in popularity in the 1950s with several new translations and various articles about Poe. The peak followed in the 1960s with the publication of 20 new translations of Poe's short stories by Joze Udovic and with Andrej Arko's selection of Poe's works published under the title Krokar (The Raven, 1985). Udovic's translations not only set new standards in terms of quality but also introduced Slovenian readers to the previously less known part of Poe's oeuvre, most notably so the detective story and the stories of ratiocination. Udovic also contributed to the volume a substantial and influential Afterword, which later reverberated in many other critical texts on Poe in Slovenia. Even though almost no new translations appeared in subsequent decades, old ones nevertheless were reprinted several times. At the same time, Poe's works became subject of several academic papers after the 1990s, including Slavoj Zizek's in the collection of essays Ukradeni Poe (The Purloined Poe, 1990).
This article focuses on the issue of the "nationalist" interpretation of Vladimir Bartol's 1935 collection of short stories Al Araf. Relying extensively on the manuscripts from his estate and ...published documentation, it seeks to prove that this issue does not have any unilateral answers. The commonly held impression is that while writing his collection Bartol treated the ethnic issue solely as one of the many ideas he experimented with in his stories. This was also how his contemporaries understood him at that time. However, more recent, "nationalist" interpretations can nonetheless find firm support in Bartol's postwar self-explanation and especially in the fact that the writer's novellas thematized the type of subjectivity that Slovenians needed to carry out great historical changes and in some way predicted these changes. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This article proceeds from the finding of the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who claimed that every city is "individualized" by its residents. Slovenian writers do the same with Ljubljana through ...their professional, cultural, and political activity, and direct or indirect depictions of the city in their literary works. This process is illustrated by Ivan and Izidor Cankar, Vladimir Bartol, Edvard Kocbek, and Vitomil Zupan. These examples form the basis for developing a typology of the relationship between Slovenian writers and Ljubljana. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Alamut, which has been translated into 19 languages around the world, was originally intended by Vladimir Bartol as a criticism of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Bartol had hoped to achieve ...instant recognition for Alamut, but World War II quickly sent the book into obscurity, where it remained for nearly six decades, until another war fifty years later brought it back to life. Bartol based his story on Hasan ibn Sabbah, the charismatic 11th century Ismaili leader whom historians regard as the world's first political terrorist. Legend has it that from his castle of Alamut in northern Iran, Hasan used hashish and beautiful women to cajole young men into believing that he held the keys to Paradise. In exchange for those keys, they agreed to embark on assassination missions, the original suicide missions, for their leader.
Igor Samobor (Hasan ibn Saba, Seiduna, poglavar izmailcev) in Marko Mandić (Ibn Tahir, Avani)
Avtor odrske priredbe Dušan Jovanović
Režiser Sebastijan Horvat, premieri 28. 7. 2005 v Salzburgu in 8. ...10. 2005 v Ljubljani, SNG Drama Ljubljana in Salzburger Festspiele
