In the past decade there have been at least four important scholarly monographs about criticism: Matija Ogrin's two books Literarno vrednotenje na Slovenskem (Literary evaluation in Slovenia 2002 and 2003), Draga Sega's Literarna kritika (Literary criticism 2004), and Robert Jereb's dissertation, "Struktura in funkcija literarne kritike" (The structure and function of literary criticism 2009). For a complete picture it is also necessary to include Boris Paternu's Estetske osnove Levstikove literarne kritike (The aesthetic bases of Levstik's literary criticism 1962), which is among the most important reflections on Slovene literary criticism. The author deals with a precisely defined critical paradigm, but at the same time answers many questions vital to criticism-historical, cultural, political, psychological, sociological, and anthropological. Paternu links literary criticism's reliability with solid aesthetic principles and takes into account the subjective and objective possibilities determined by the various contexts in which it appears. The study's integrity and thoroughness is achieved by analyzing the genesis of Levstik's concept of literary criticism, and then his main ideas and aesthetic grounding: the origin and purpose of literature, relations between external and internal literary reality, linguistic outlook, and theory of features. He placed Fran Levstik's accomplishments in the comparative context of German, French, and Russian writings on realism, and thus revealed Levstik's sophisticated views on contemporary literature. He emphasized that Levstik's young literary reflection avoids didacticism and gravitates to spontaneity, liveliness, and sincerity. He remains firmly wedded to the ideals of personal and national freedom as they derive from Preseren's liberated poetic person, but at the same time he materializes and thus recontextualizes them. When Paternu takes up Levstik's intellectual profile, he finds evidence to assert that already in his youth Levstik tended to search out the intellectual components of a work of literature, and in each case replaced philosophic and speculative content with a search for insights anchored in reality. Paternu discusses Levstik's critical model of literary development, culture and civilization, history and politics so as to isolate the causes and effects of events and situations and to show how they motivated Levstik's critical thought on the Slovene and broader European spheres. In the first place, there are the problems of literary provincialism, a strong clerical coloring, and Jovan Vesel Koseski's mentorship, as well as theoretical principles. Paternu paints a broad canvas onto which he places education at the time, domestic literary opinions, current German theoreticians, and traditional views. He organically inserts Levstik's intimate poetic convictions, formed of personal experience, polemics with conservative views of literature, personal correspondence with the few who agreed with him, and comments on the wider cultural, public opinion, and national situation. Among teachers important to Levstik, Paternu points to the high school teacher Peter Petruzzij. He recalls Levstik's disappointment that the reading public ignored his collected Pesmi (Poems 1854), while the Roman Catholic party sharply attacked it. He defines the most significant features of Levstik's critical work, which he finds in the introduction to a review of Valjavec's poems (1855), and he underlines that here Levstik creates an integrated literary aesthetic concept, which he generally adheres to later on: He extended his understanding of poetry to all of literary production, paying special attention to characters' traits, natures, actions, and physical appearance, thereby emphasizing his interest in objective models of literature. Paternu sees the importance of Levstik's criticism in his consideration of domestic conditions and adherence to a universal view keyed into contemporary literary trends.2