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Marko Juvan: ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature andLiterary Studies, Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia,marko.juvan@zrc-sazu.si

The Aesthetics and Politics of Belonging:

National Poets between “Vernacularism” and “Cosmopolitanism”

In his seminal essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of

Multinational Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson claims that “third-

world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested

with a properly libidinal dynamic – necessarily project a

political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of

the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the

public third-world culture and society” (69). Postcolonial critics decried

Jameson for his apparent western-centric disdain of ‘the rest’ of

the world which, in contrast to the presumed western monopoly on

modernity, aesthetic culture, and individualism, was condemned to

backward collectivism and eclecticism (on this, see Habjan). Such

criticism is unjustified insofar as, in the third-world “national

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allegories,” Jameson recognizes emancipatory, strategic, and

conscious responses of writer-intellectuals to their subaltern

condition within the capitalist world-system (74–76). Moreover,

Jameson does not limit allegorical structures to the post-

colonial situation, claiming that they are unconsciously present

in the first-world literature in which “political commitment is

recontained and psychologized or subjectivized” (71). Thus,

national allegory seems to be ubiquitous: it is implicit and

unconscious in western literature, which plays the role of the

Hegelian master caught in idealism; and explicit and strategic in

literature of the global East and South – paradoxically,

precisely because of its role as the Hegelian slave, a dependent

literature “can attain some true materialistic consciousness of

its situation” (85).

In my view, Jameson’s thesis about the national allegory of

(post)modern third-world literature, thanks to its focus on the

tropology of “libidinal investment” in emancipatory politics (see

Jameson 72), is pertinent to 19th century first-world literature

and its dialectics of “longing and belonging” for two reasons.1

1 The paper addresses the overall topic of the 6th REELC/ENCLS Congress titledLonging and Belonging (Dublin and Galway, August 2015). A shorter version of the

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First, the poetic “longing” of writer-intellectuals from European

(semi)peripheries, who were aware of their subaltern position not

only in their respective societies but also within the emerging

world literary system, proves to be an aesthetic form

articulating their libidinal investment in “belonging” to their

nation’s imagined community. Second, because literary historical

narratives of postcolonial literatures often emulated the

national models of their western predecessors (Hutcheon 3–4, 14–

18), it can be assumed that, in literatures, too, allegorizing

identity politics through aesthetic discourse has its roots in

(post)romantic western nationalism. Henceforth, the 20th century

postcolonial “desire for national self-determination” (Hutcheon

16) echoes the same longing of peripheral national movements

across 19th century Europe. Their representative writers were

also able to grasp their dependencies created by the asymmetries

of the world-system, which at the time was politically dominated

by monarchic empires.

It is worth noting that, in some literatures, the very

notion of longing epitomizes national belonging; that is, the

paper was posted on the REELC/ENCLS website.

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desire of individuals to become subjects of national ideology.

Consider, for example, the famous ‘longing’ of Irish expatriates

for their homeland, or Slovenian hrepenenje (i. e., longing or

yearning for an unattainable object or person, a better future,

or lost and idealized past). Moreover, the notion of longing is

often understood as a singular trait of a particular national

identity, a trait fully articulated only in the works of national

classics. In this context, Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu talks about

the Romanian national poet Mihai Eminescu, who figured in

Romanian criticism as “a poet of nostalgia called ‘dor’ (yearning

love, intense sense of loss, longing for an irretrievable past) –

a feeling that is said to be so typically Romanian that it can be

only approximated through such counterparts as Sehnsucht, longing,

saudade, or soledad” (92). More generally, the concept of longing

presupposes an object of desire that is temporally and/or

spatially displaced, and it is the relationship to this common

object that characterizes individuals’ sense of belonging to the

same imagined community. The pair ‘longing and belonging’ thus

corresponds to the Lacanian notion of “desire.” As explained by

Dylan Evans, to Lacan desire is “the surplus produced by the

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articulation of need in demand” and thus “can never be satisfied;

it is constant in its pressure, and eternal” (38). What gives

desire its insatiability of “longing” is the lack of recognition

of the subject by the Other and the craving to be loved or

desired by the Other (Evans 38–39) – that is, the need to

‘belong.’

The circles of writers and intellectuals that initiated many

post-Enlightenment national awakenings in the east-central and

northern peripheries of Europe were aware of their dependence on

the foreign-speaking imperial power and ruling class, such as

those of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian Empires. Because the

literati committed to a particular ‘national awakening’ were weak

and few in number, they sought to be desired and recognized by

two unequal Others. On the one hand, nationalist writers assigned

the role of the Other to a particular imagined community they

were planning to establish through their intellectual and

political work. Thus, they strove to stoke enthusiasm among the

majority of the population, which was indifferent to nationalist

ideology, for a cultivated public use of their vernacular and

their literary publications, which were intended to imagine and

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lend ideological coherence to the quasi-collective subject they

called a ‘nation.’ On the other hand, however, nationalist groups

of writers directed their desire to be desired and recognized

towards the very center of cultural and political domination that

played the role of universal, law-giving Other. In the emerging

inter-state and world literature systems, European imperialist

powers claimed possession of the ‘generally European’ cultural

tradition and thus figured as the only legitimate representatives

of the symbolic universality of values such as aesthetic

perfection, cultivated language, and well-developed media and

institutional infrastructure. The roles of the nationally

particular and the transnationally universal Other are

dialectically related. The internal Other as the ideologeme of a

Nation presupposes the external universal Other (inscribed in the

ideologemes of the Greco-Latin legacy, Christianity, the

classics, or world literature) and vice versa. As elaborated

elsewhere (cf. Juvan, Literary 77–79), the idea of nation is itself

a transnational phenomenon – particular national movements in

Europe variously enacted the same universal pattern – because the

emerging inter-state system, as the political counterpart of the

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modern capitalist world-system required the existence of nation-

states. At the level of cultural production, the longing to be

recognized by the universal Other, and the literary strategies

employed to attain this impossible recognition, are instrumental

in the development of cultural strategies of gaining recognition

by the national imagined community, that is, the particular

Other. Conversely, the universality of the external Other is

addressed with the aim of consolidating the internal Other and

ideologically suppressing the class and ethnic contradictions

within a given national imagined community.

In romanticism, the Greco-Latin classical canon was replaced

by the Eurocentric canon of world literature, consisting of

remnants of the ancient classics plus selections from the

medieval and modern writings of successive leading literatures

(Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, British, French, and German).

Thus, in his brilliant paper on European national poets, Virgil

Nemoianu argues that before romanticism any poetic achievement

was measured “by the extent to which it approaches the standards

and values prescribed by a venerable and firmly reliable

tradition” (249). With the 19th century “emergence and/or

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consolidation of the nation-state” and especially among the

stateless national movements, “validation of an ethno-linguistic

(‘national’) group by a personal and autonomous literature” (249)

became indispensable, not only in eastern Europe but also in its

southern and northwestern peripheries. “Reaching and

demonstrating to others a certain level of intellectual and

aesthetic achievement had become of high importance.” (249)

Ever since the late-18th century, when first-world

literatures began to produce national allegories, the newly

invented figure of ‘national poet’ became typical of east-central

Europe. In his lucid comparative introduction to a series of case

studies on this topic, the late John Neubauer stresses that

“national poets arguably emerged in the course of their country’s

romantic national awakening preceded by the country’s exposure to

Modernism” and that they are “not unique for this region, and

though they seem typical, not all countries of the region seem to

have national poets” (Neubauer, “Figures” 11). National poets

started to play the role of an instrument calibrating the level

of a particular national literature against canonic standards of

world literature, classical and modern. From among a host of

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literary producers, the poets elevated as ‘national,’ such as

Schiller, Burns, Moore, Mickiewicz, Petőfi, Eminescu, Botev,

Kreutzwald, Runeberg, Hallgrímsson, Njegoš, or Prešeren, had to

meet at least two sets of expectations (cf. Dović, “Model,” in

particular the “vita” section). They had to intervene importantly

in the ideology and politics of a respective national movement,

mainly through what Even-Zohar calls “culture planning,” whereas

their literary texts had to have topmost merits for the aesthetic

cultivation of the vernacular and the narration of nation. That

is to say, for the ethnic community of their native country, the

work of national poets proved the international standards of

their literary language, articulated or invented the national

past, pronounced national longing, and envisioned the national

future (cf. Neubauer, “Figures”; Koropeckyj 19–20; Penčev 117).

As explained earlier, “the dramatic appeal of biographies and

aesthetic merits of selected poets were employed as cultural

symbols in nation building,” because national poets strengthened

the internal cohesion of the ethnic community by encouraging it

to assert its national subjectivity in the international arena

(Juvan, “Romanticism and National Poets” 593).

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National movements regarded the poets they were canonizing

as modern classics that deserved to enter the European hyper-

canon of Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. It may be claimed

that the canonization of poets as national cultural saints

functioned as a secular parallel to the sanctification process in

the Catholic Church, in which grassroots initiatives to declare

someone’s sainthood had to be confirmed by the universal

authority of the Pope. Correspondingly, the virtues of particular

national poets could truly represent their nation internationally

only if their ‘internal’ canonicity also gained recognition from

the ‘outside,’ that is, if the gaze of the imagined lawgiving

Other confirmed the poet’s placement in the universal tradition.

In the case of the 19th century national poets, the position of

the universal Other was taken by the emerging space of world

literature, which was simultaneously phantasmatic (from the

perspectives internal to particular literary fields) and real (as

an international publishing and translation market reflecting the

inequalities of the inter-state system dominated by core

countries). Thus, canonizing a poet as a nation’s cultural saint

(“sainting”) implied his or her “worlding” (Kadir’s term; see

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Hayot); that is, the intentional positioning of agents of a

particular (national) literary field within the imagined

universal space of world literature and their efforts to

participate in unequal interactions between European languages

and literatures.2 As Nemoianu succinctly put it: “Establishing a

‘national poet’ was a kind of shorthand, a summary of the

achievements and of the profile” of a particular nation on the

“Olympian plateau” of Weltliteratur (254–255).

Cultural nationalism of ethnicities dependent on western,

eastern, or central European empires established ambivalent

relationships with aesthetic standards deemed universal. For

instance, in 1867 Titu Maiorescu, the leading representative of

the Junimea literary society, accused modern Romania of copying

merely the forms of western culture without providing them with

genuine substance (Terian 4). Commenting on these positions taken

by Romanian critics vis-à-vis world literature, Andrei Terian

2 Another paper shows that the imaginary worlding of national poets (placingthem in the phantasmatic world literary space through perspectives internal toa particular literary system) may be ideologically successful, whereas theiractual presence in the global literary space hardly corresponds to homegrownperceptions. The potential for a particular literary text written in aperipheral language/literature to gain actual access to global literarycirculation depends on the asymmetries and consecrators of the world literaryand translation systems (Juvan, “Svetovljenje”).

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draws on Mircea Martin’s recent theory of “cultural complexes.”

These “emerg[e] from the comparison (constantly detrimental to

the subject) with an Other,” that is, the established and

universally respected western canon (Terian 4). In Terian’s view,

the “refusal to accept the peripheral role of a literature”

resorts to several different strategies:

“1) the favorable comparison of one’s own writers or

literature with foreign authors or other literatures, 2) the

construction of a ‘national character’ starting from […]

characteristics which should illustrate literary excellence

or even universality, and 3) the attempt to appropriate an

archaic or regional literary heritage which would ‘elevate’

that particular literature.” (5)

Summarizing these interliterary strategies, Terian

formulates a typological opposition between the tendencies

towards “vernacularization” and “cosmopolitanization.” The former

tendency creates a protectionist image of a strong, independent,

and individual national literature, while the latter strives for

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“affiliation” and “acculturation” of “universal” tradition (8).

Homologous to the tensions between the aesthetically autonomous

and heteronomous (i. e., politically instrumental) poles of

individual literatures within what Pascale Casanova calls “the

world republic of letters,” 60–67, 123–155),3 both

vernacularization and cosmopolitanization are present as

tendencies in a given literary field and the inherent struggle

for domination. Although vernacularization emphasizes ethnic

autochthonism, its very concepts and strategies, such as

cultivation of folklore, narration of the national past, and

standardization of the vernacular, result from the transnational

ideology and practices of Herderian cultural nationalism, which

itself is a post-Enlightenment variety of cosmopolitanism. As we

will see below, the tendency towards cosmopolitanization, too,

has its vernacularist dimension, because it aims to cultivate the

vernacular through aesthetic forms and thus to strengthen the

interpellative and affective forces of nationalism.

3 According to Casanova, the autonomous pole in a particular (peripheral)literary field tends to follow modern literary processes initiated by anddiffused from cosmopolitan metropolises, notably Paris. Within a nationalliterature, the autonomous pole thus stimulates modernity and literariness,while the heteronomous pole clings on to the national political role ofliterature.

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It seems that European national poets involved in the

politics of pre- or post-1848 national movements predominantly

showed an anti-classicist vernacularist tendency, demonstrating

that romantic literature did not amount to individual fantasies

and arbitrary inspiration. Nemoianu notes that the romantics

constructed “a solid pedigree of their own,” a kind of “viable

Romantic alternative to the classical and the neoclassical

tradition” (250). Their recourse to the vernacular European canon

of Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare and efforts to recover or

even forge literary relics of old indigenous traditions both

legitimated the romantic versions of the modern literary canon

(250). Hence, several national poets, such as Mickiewicz

(Koropeckyj 20), Petőfi (Neubauer, “Petőfi” 43–49), Njegoš

(Slapšak 110) or Botev (Penčev 117–118), lean towards aesthetic

depiction of ethnoscapes, creative emulation of folklore,

expressive individual spontaneity, originality, historicist or

antiquarian evocation of the national past, and an openly

political or satirical discourse. However, in an endeavor to

ennoble their vernacular and seemingly homegrown traditions, they

paradoxically follow the transnational pattern – that of a pre-

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romantic national bard. Exemplified in Homer, the national bard

is supposed to think and speak for his imagined community,

bridging the gap between its remote past and present.

Furthermore, the national bard is supposed to link folklore

(i. e., the oral, popular culture tradition) with high literature

as an elite form of modern bourgeois print culture.4 As a rule,

the national poet imbues his vernacular with an aesthetic

component that he adopts from well-known literary forms emanating

mostly from centers of the emerging world literary system.

Through such an import, which contains varying proportions and

mixtures of post-Herderian folklorism, landscape poetry, and high

literary forms (e. g., Byronism, the ode, the sonnet, the

romantic epic poem, or the alexandrine), the national poet

purportedly dignifies his mother tongue and sublates its

dialectal and sociolectal heteroglossia. In turn, canonization of

his literary texts thus essentially contributes to the

standardization of language.

4 For example, according to the canonic Bulgarian interpretation, Botev’s“poetry ‘closes the gap' between folklore and literature” (Penčev 118).Equivalent views could be found in other literatures of the region.

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In Nemoianu’s opinion, it was Germany, with Schiller and

Goethe, that represented a slightly different model of the

national poet. It is based on the universality of the classical

tradition merged with romanticism (253–254). A more pronounced

‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘affiliative’ orientation towards the

universal canon and the classical tradition is also

characteristic of the Slovenian national movement and its

national poet, France Prešeren (1800–1849).5 Granted, Prešeren

did also write according to the vernacularization strategy: he

adapted folk songs and ballads, wrote casual couplets and love

poems intended to be embraced by country lads, and occasionally

expressed his political and nationalist views in verse. However,

the canonization process marginalized the vernacular Prešeren. It

seems then, that in the Slovenian long 19th century, Prešeren was

more relevant as the figure of a singular “national classic”

5 Prešeren might have an exceptional place among east-central Europeannational poets due to his intensive intertextual drawing on the Greco-Latin,medieval, renaissance, and baroque literary repertoires (see below; with his19th century historicism, Prešeren could be termed, somewhat metaphorically, aromantic postmodernist), even though evocation of world-historic horizons canbe found in other romantic poets of the region as well. For example, SvetlanaSlapšak mentions in this manner Njegoš’s “hermetic epic Luča mikrokozma (TheRay of the Microcosm; 1845), which was influenced by Dante’s Divine Comedy andMilton’s Paradise Lost” (110). Similarly, Eminescu, in his poem “Memento mori,”“attempted to rewrite in a Schopenhauerian vein the history of the decay ofcivilizations, from Egypt to Troy, to Rome and beyond” (Mihăilescu 91).

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whose oeuvre compensates for the apparent lack of classical and

modern traditions in Slovenian and who is on par with the peaks

of European hyper-canon.6 Slovenian cultural nationalism, in its

backing of Prešeren’s canonical afterlife (on this, see Dović,

“France Prešeren”), thus preferred to affiliate Slovenians to the

phantasmatic values of the dominating Other, while sublimating

the resulting inferiority complex in several defense mechanisms.

At the turn of the 20th century, the ambitious desire for

national subjecthood and self-assertion, blocked by realities of

being a peripheral and small latecomer, finally produced a

persistent self-denigrating self-image of Slovenians as hlapci

(serfs), launched by the dramatist Ivan Cankar (see Žižek).

All that being said, in comparison with national poets, such

as Petőfi or Botev, Prešeren’s oeuvre does not strike one as

extremely politically engaged.7 This should not come as a

surprise if we consider the historical shifts of Prešeren’s6 Singling out a 19th century author to be canonized as a national poet and“uncritically praised by virtually all parties, ideologies, and politicalsystems of the country” fits the general pattern of canonization as describedby Neubauer (“Figures” 14); however, Slovenian canonization of the nationalpoet seems to depart from the model according to which, in Neubauer’s words,“[t]he canonization of a national poet inevitably involved suppressing thetransnational elements in his poetic identity” (14).7 Mácha, too, “was not particularly politically inclined,” his pessimism“restrained his political engagement” (Pynsent 58).

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canonic image: dubbed “the poet of love” in romanticism and post-

romanticism, he was regarded as an existential poet in modernism

and a meta-poet in post-modernism (see, e. g., Stritar 16–17;

Martinović; Paternu, France Prešeren; Juvan, “Poèzija”). The

impression of the politically unpronounced nature of Prešeren’s

poetry can be verified by employing empirical methods, such as

quantitative analysis of the poet’s lexicon. Correspondingly, in

his 1847 collection Poezije, the most frequent content words are

srce ‘heart’ (112 occurrences), oko ‘eye’ (68), Bog ‘God’ (58), čas

‘time’ (57), peti ‘sing’ (57), lep ‘beautiful’ (53), and ljubezen

‘love’ (52). Words related to the semantic network of politics

(regardless of their actual contextual meaning) represent less

than 2% of the total 16,878 different word forms (see Scherber),

while the share of texts with political topics is roughly 16% (in

Poezije), 29% (in his German poems), and 18% in his entire opus.

In Prešeren’s “political” vocabulary, words with a frequency

equal to or above 5 refer to the concepts of economy (5: denar

‘money’), homeland (6: domačija ‘home, native country’; 7: rojak

‘compatriot’; 16: dežela ‘country’), nation and ethnicity (7:

narod ‘nation, people’; 8: kranjski ‘Carniolan’; 10: slava ‘Slavdom,

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glory’; 10: slovenski ‘Slovenian’; 19: Slovenec ‘a Slovenian’), and

religion (7: kristjan n. ‘Christian’; 27: vera ‘religion, belief’).

Words denoting the liberal value of freedom are relatively

prominent: (3: prostost ‘liberty, freedom’; 4: prost, adj. ‘free’).

Taking into account that thematic classification of poetic texts

might be reductionist, it can nevertheless be argued that most of

Prešeren’s politically colored texts are about cultural struggle

(8% of texts in Poezije, 14% in German poems, 9% in the entire

opus), national cause (4% in Poezije, 9% in German poems, 5% in

the entire opus), and the poet’s social condition (2% in Poezije,

6% in German poems, 2% in the entire opus), while proclaiming

liberal ideas finds its way in 1% of Prešeren’s poetry.

The apparent paucity of political overtones in the writings

of the Slovenian national poet partly results from pressures of

the pre-March Austrian censorship, which was much harsher in

provincial Carniola than elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire, where

Catholic rigorists did not possess as much power. Moreover, the

smothered political voices in Prešeren’s poetry seem to be in

line with his troubled middle-class and bohemian life (on

biography, see Slodnjak) devoid of heroic deeds otherwise proudly

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registered in the biographies of some national seers and freedom

fighters. Coming from a relatively well-off peasant family in

Upper Carniola, he was born in 1800 and spent his youth far away

from home, dependent on his priest uncles, scholarships, and

precarious jobs. He excelled in school and at the University of

Vienna, where he became a promising doctor of law, but he

experienced social pressures and the limitations of the ‘micro-

physics of power’ (to borrow Foucault’s term) quite early in his

career. As an outsider, he repeatedly made efforts to find his

place among the Carniolian Bildungsbürgertum by trying in vain to

secure an economically solid professional standing that would

allow him to pursue his poetic vocation (only three years before

his death in 1849 did he finally succeed in obtaining his own

legal office in a provincial market town Kranj).

With regard to Jameson’s concepts of national allegory and

his interpretation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectics, it

can be argued that Prešeren, in his self-reflective poem “Glosa”

(Gloss) of 1834, assumes the subject role of a Hegelian slave

that is capable of grasping the material conditions of his being

and writing. Thus, Prešeren the poet understands all too well

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that in the Habsburg province of Carniola, located on the

southeastern margins of European industrial capitalism, writing

literature as a form of labor was marginalized and despised by

the ruling classes:

“Slep je, kdor se s petjam

vkvarja,

Kranjec moj mu osle kaže;

pevcu vedno sreča laže,

on živi, umrje brez

dnarja.”

Le začniva pri Homeri,

prosil reva dni je stare;

mraz Ovidja v Pontu tare;

“He who sings is blind

of eye,

gibed by Carniolan

throng,

tricked by fortune’s

siren song,

penniless he’ll live

and die.”

Our rhyme with Homer

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drugih pevcov zgodbe beri:

nam spričuje Alighieri,

káko sreča pevce udarja;

nam spričujeta pisarja

Luzijade, Don Kihota,

kákošne Parnasa pota –

slep je, kdor se s petjam

vkvarja.

“Káj Petrarkov, káj nam

Tasov

treba pevcov je

prijetnih?”

slišim od butic neukretnih

prašat zdanjih, prednjih

starts,

who was pressed to beg

when old;

Ovid bore the Pontic

cold;

read the tales of other

bards:

you may learn from

Dante’s stars

how a bard is cursed

with plight;

learn from men who once

did write

the Lusiads, Don

Quixote:

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časov.

Kómur mar prijetnih glasov

pesem, ki pojó Matjaže,

boje krog hrvaške straže,

mar, kar pevec pel Ilirje,

mar Čebel'ce roji štirje,

Kranjec moj mu osle kaže.

Lani je slepar starino

še prodajal, nosil škatle,

meril platno, trak na

vatle,

letos kupi si grajšino.

Naj gre pevec v daljno

Kino,

še naprej se pot mu kaže,

naj si s tinto prste maže,

naj ljubezen si obeta,

vneti lepega dekleta,

pevcu vedno sreča laže.

steep is the Parnassus

slope –

he who sings is blind

of eye.

“What’s the use of

pleasant sound

sung by Tasso or

Petrarch?”

I can still hear

bumpkins ask,

as they used to, clear

and loud.

Think of King Matthias

proud –

who cares for that

pleasant song,

frontier battles lost

and won,

lays of the Illyrian

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Vender peti on ne jenja;

grab'te dnarje vkup

gotove,

kupovájte si gradove,

v njih živite brez

trpljénja!

Koder se nebo razpenja,

grad je pevca brez

vratarja,

v njem zlatnina čista

zarja,

srebrnina rosa trave,

s tem posestvam brez

težave

on živi, umrje brez

dnarja.

(Prešeren, Zbrano delo 1:

111–112)

bard,

swarms of “Bee,” is

always hard

gibed by Carniolan

throng.

Yesteryear one fraud

still sold

curios, lugged round a

box,

measured yards of

ribbon, cloth:

now he’s buying a

chateau.

But a bard, though he

should go

to far China, wanders

on;

should he scribble all

day long,

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should he hope to find

the key

to a beauty’s heart,

he’ll be

tricked by fortune’s

siren song.

Yet his music will not

cease;

you may well pile up a

hoard,

buy yourselves a castle

fort,

live in it in unmarred

peace!

Where the vaulted

heavens reach,

porterless the bard’s

halls rise,

and his gold is – clear

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dawn light

and his silver – dew on

grass:

happy with this wealth

amassed,

penniless he’ll live

and die.

(Manuscript, trans.

Nada Grošelj)

Although Prešeren’s strategy of national awakening8 relied

on transforming a thin layer of Carniolan intelligentsia into a

devout public capable of enjoying aesthetic literature printed in

a cultivated Slovenian, in his “Glosa” he shows awareness of the

8 Prešeren’s strategy, developed according to the Schlegelian ideas of hislearned friend Matija Čop (1797–1835), was typical of the initial phases of‘dependent’ east-central European national movements that took place inmonarchies headed by ‘foreign’ ruling classes. According to Hroch (“Fromnational”), national awakening in countries like Carniola initially relied onphilological, scholarly, and literary activities by a few intellectuals, whodiscovered, invented, raised awareness of, and provided evidence for the mainattributes of these national communities and their historical continuity(language, literature, history, mythology and folklore, customs, territory,and religion).

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material conditions that were impeding his plans to enculturate

the imagined community of Slovenians through poetry. The

prevailing peasant and Slovenian-speaking population was largely

illiterate and insufficiently educated to read high poetry,

whereas the ruling classes were indifferent towards the romantic

notions of the aesthetic autonomy of art and/or the nation as a

community based on the vernacular language, common history, and

culture. However, Prešeren encourages himself to insist on

writing aesthetic poetry in Slovenian in spite of limitations

typical of a peripheral capitalist society. In “Glosa,” he

invents his utopia of the aesthetic realm by adducing

intertextual exempla of the world classics, appropriating their

cultural capital, channeling it into a nascent literary field on

the periphery, and metaphorically evoking the autonomy of art as

the inversion of the economic capital (see Juvan, Literary 79).

Historical documents of censorship and the police reports

attached to his numerous pleas for an independent law office

testify that Prešeren was often under surveillance by local

authorities. They suspected him of being a Freigeist (a free-

thinker) and were scandalized by his unconventional, increasingly

Juvan 28

bohemian lifestyle. Although Prešeren maintained friendly

relations with Slovenian and Slavic liberal nationalists and

persecuted revolutionaries, such as the Polish deportee Emil

Korytko, his political views hardly came out of the closet.

However, the Slovenian national poet did not confine his

political discourse to privacy, as one might infer from the

thematic and lexical statistics presented above. The prominence

of the political in Prešeren’s poetry does not arise from the

mere quantity of ‘political’ words or themes, but from the

semantic power and context of his poetic speech acts, together

with the effects that his texts triggered among contemporaries

and in the ensuing Wirkungsgeschichte. For instance, Prešeren dared

to translate literary works that disturbed reactionary Europe

(Bürger’s ballad “Lenore,” Körner’s “Lützow’s Wild Chase,”

Byron’s “Parisina,” and Mickiewicz’s “Wajdelota’s Song”). He paid

tribute to revolutionary movements between 1830 and 1848 not only

with such translations but, more importantly, also with original

poems, such as “Zdravljica” (Toast), later canonized as the

national anthem. “Zdravljica” was written in 1844, censored

twice, and finally published on the occasion of the 1848 Spring

Juvan 29

of Nations. In the seemingly innocent genre frame – drinking to

someone’s health in the jovial privacy of the company at the

table – Prešeren, inspired by Thomas Paine’s 1791 Rights of Man

(Paternu, “K virom”), subversively packs in a series of radical

political pronouncements, starting with the second strophe:

Komú narpred veselo

zdravljico, bratje! čmò

zapét’!

Bog našo nam deželo,

Bog živi ves slovenski

svet,

brate vse,

kar nas je

sinóv sloveče matere!

V sovražnike ‘z oblakov

rodú naj naš’ga treši

gróm;

prost, ko je bil očakov,

naprej naj bo Slovencov

Now whom for our first

triple

Shall we, glad brothers,

toast in song?

Our land, us Slovene people

May God endow with lifetime

long,

Where’er found

Brothers, bound

As sons to mother much

renowned.

May our home skies wage

warfare,

With thunder strike the

Juvan 30

dom;

naj zdrobé

njih roké

si spone, ki jih še težé!

Edinost, sreča, sprava

k nam naj nazaj se vrnejo;

otrók, kar ima Slava,

vsi naj si v róke sežejo,

de oblast

in z njo čast,

ko préd, spet naša boste

last! […]

Živé naj vsi naródi,

ki hrepené dočakat’ dan,

ko, koder sonce hodi,

prepir iz svéta bo

pregnan,

ko rojak

enemy!

Henceforth, as were our

forebears’,

May Slovenes’ homes be

truly free;

Let their hands

Iron bands

Constrict, who still

oppress our lands!

May unity, joy, blessing

Return, may we be

reconciled!

And, brotherhood

professing,

Close linked be Slava’s

every child,

That again

We may reign

And honour, riches now

Juvan 31

prost bo vsak,

ne vrag, le sosed bo

mejak! […]

(Prešeren, Zbrano delo 1: 28–

30)

regain! […]

Let’s drink that every

nation

Will live to see that

bright day’s birth

When ‘neath the sun’s

rotation

Dissent is banished from

the earth,

All will be

Kinfolk free

With neighbors none in

enmity. […]

(Prešeren, Poems 159–161,

trans. Tom M. S. Priestly and

Henry R. Cooper)

Juvan 32

In his “Zdravljica,” Prešeren links the ideas of French

Revolution (liberty and egalitarianism) with the cosmopolitan

vision of peaceful co-existence among free European nations and

calls for Slovenian national emancipation and Slavic solidarity.

The overall thrust of his political ideas is in advocating the

national emancipation of Slovenians and other Slavic peoples in

the Austrian Empire by way of cultural nationalism, primarily

through aesthetic literature and establishing nationalized print

media and cultural institutions. This is also the reason why his

‘political’ vocabulary and thematics pertain mostly to the issues

of ethnic identity, language politics, sociolinguist conditions

of literary writing (diglossia, bi-literarity), and cultural

struggle with conservative forces in Carniola, especially the

influential rigorist clergy.

In his brilliant biographic study of 1952, Anton Slodnjak

suggests that Prešeren’s deliberate task “to sing about his own

life in such a cultivated language and art form as to arouse

interest in poetry in every educated man” was, given the

historical context, “not only artistic, but also – or even more

so – political.” Slodnjak’s finding is a premonition of Jameson’s

Juvan 33

concept of subjective, seemingly personal, private, and desire-

driven literature as an allegory of national longing and

belonging. The political is thus omnipresent in Prešeren, albeit

mostly implicitly. It shines through national allegorization of

the poet’s existential drama, erotic desire, and belletristic

commitment. For example, in his 1834 “Sonetni venec” (The Sonnet

Wreath), inspired by Kollár’s 1824 monumental pan-Slavist sonnet

cycle Slávy dcera (The Daughter of Sláva), he turns the virtuoso

mannerist composition (14 sonnets plus a master theme) and

historicist Petrarchan imagery into a subjective romantic symbol.

Through it, he interlaces his romantic erotic longing with an

Orphean mission of the national poet, whose ideal task is to

cultivate and politically unite his compatriots and bring them

back on the stage of national history after their millennial

slavery:

Obdajale so utrjene jih skale,

ko nekdaj Orfejovih strun

glasóve,

ki so jim ljudstva Tracije

surove

Midst circling mountain-cliffs

malevolent,

As once amid the sounds of

Orpheus’ lyre,

To which round Haemus and

Juvan 34

krog Hema, Ródope bile se

vdale.

De bi nebesa milost nam

skazale!

otajat’ Krajna našega sinove,

njih in Slovencov vseh okrog

rodove,

z domačmi pesmam’ Orfeja

poslale!

De bi nam srca vnel za čast

dežele,

med nami potolažil razprtije,

in spet zedinil rod Slovenš'ne

cele!

De b’ od sladkóte njega

poezije

potihnil ves prepir, bile

Rhodope entire

Did yield the Thracian people

violent.

O may the iron will of heav’n

relent!

And may, in order Slovenes to

inspire,

And Carniolan hearts to melt

with fire,

With native songs an Orpheus be

sent!

That he enflame our love of

fatherland

And comfort our dissension so

unwise,

Anew unite the Slovenes, firm

to stand!

Juvan 35

vesele

viharjov jeznih mrzle

domačije!

(Prešeren, Zbrano delo 1: 143)

That through his dulcet songs

we realise

An end to strife; that joy may

fill our land,

Inclement home where icy storms

chastise!

(Prešeren, Poems 93, trans. Tom

M. S. Priestly and Henry R.

Cooper)

Adopting the universal mythical figure of Orpheus, as he

knew it from the classical tradition, Prešeren boldly produces a

utopian allegory of himself as the Slovenian national poet. His

cosmopolitan intertextuality and imagery thus bring about the

ideological notion of the nation as a historical and cultural

community united and constituted by the aesthetic power of

literature.9 According to this notion of nation, it is the9 This poetic vision is in line with the general, almost clichéd retrospectionby literary historians that “the ‘small nations’ of central and eastern Europeas modern socio-cultural entities was in various ways the work of literati”

Juvan 36

universality of high literature (Orphean poetry) that saves the

community from fragmentation and unresolvable contradictions.

In addition to such allegories, Prešeren’s very founding of

intentionally autonomous and ‘worlded’ aesthetic discourse in the

Slovenian language is no less political. The prevailing cultural

politics in Carniola, relying on post-Herderian conservative

Enlightenment as propagated by the prominent Slovenian linguist

and imperial censor Jernej Kopitar (1780–1840), preferred what

Terian would call “vernacularization” of Slovenian letters.

Struggling against this ideology, Prešeren and his theoretical

mentor Matija Čop (librarian, philologist, literary historian,

and critic) took up another model of relating Slovenian

literature to the norm-giving Other of European inter-literary

system – that of cosmopolitan worlding. Paradoxically

cosmopolitan and nationalist at the same time, Prešeren’s

tendency to cultivate his vernacular according to the highest

canons of world literature challenged the dominant ideology in

Carniola that allowed only popular genres of religious,

(Koropeckyj 19).

Juvan 37

educational, and morally faultless easy vernacular reading to be

addressed to the lower classes.

As a bilingual literary producer,10 Prešeren developed a

poetic style that, although it belonged to two socially unequal

linguistic systems and literatures (Slovenian and German),

represented aesthetic homogeneity at the level of a personal

idiom. With his poems written in the two languages he

demonstrated that, at least in the modern aesthetic realm, the

Slovenian language had become a de facto equal to German, the

language of the Austrian state and the public sphere. Moreover,

Prešeren often attempted to make sense of his literary activity

and Čop’s cosmopolitan nationalism, both frustrated by backward

realities, by imagining them in a phantasmatic space of universal

aesthetic values of world literature. In addition to “Glosa” and

many other poems written in Romance and classical forms, his 1835

German elegy “Dem Andenken des Matthias Čop” (In Memory of M.

Čop) is a case in point. Here he depicts his friend’s untimely

10 Neubauer’s comparative overview points out that this was typical for smallnations of east-central Europe: “Linguistic diversity was as central in theformation of national poets as mixed ethnic background. Several of them grewup multilingually, and narrowed down their linguistic identity relativelylate, partly because some languages (e. g., Croat and Slovak) were still inthe process of being standardized.” (“Figures” 13)

Juvan 38

death in the aestheticized setting of the native ethnoscape,

simultaneously letting Čop’s body and “genius” be embraced by the

world spiritual space through a chain of sublime romantic symbols

(Weltgeist, Urlicht, Krystall):

Der milden Abendsonne kühl’re Strahlen

Vergoldeten den grünen Schmuck der Aue,

Im Hintergrunde schautest du die kahlen

Giganten Oberkrains mit kühnem Baue,

Rings um dich rauschten sanft der Save Wellen,

Die dir zu sprechen schienen: uns vertraue;

Ob deinem Haupte segelten die schnellen,

Weißflock’gen Wolken hin: der Freud’ erschlossen

Fing an die Brust von hehrer Lust zu schwellen.

Nicht ahntest du, daß deine Bahn beschlossen;

Der Weltgeist sandte aus der lichten Halle,

Dich abzurufen zu des Lichts Genossen

Den Genius ab; im hellesten Krystalle

Der reinsten Woge löscht’ er aus den Funken,

Auf daß er rein zurück zum Urlicht walle.

Juvan 39

Du schiedest von der Welt begeistrungtrunken,

In voller Kraft, des Schmerzes überhoben

Zu seh’n die Deinigen in Gram versunken.

(Prešeren, Zbrano delo 2: 95–96, emphases added)

In his lament, Prešeren stresses both the national and

international importance of Čop’s supreme polyglot literary

learning, which mastered what Goethe at the time began to call

‘world literature’:

Welch herrlichen Gewinn hätt’ er getragen,

Des Wissens reichster Schatz, der nun verschlossen,

Dem Vaterland, der Welt in künft’gen Tagen!

Es trieb dich ewig vorwärts, unverdrossen

Hast du gekämpft, bis du den Sieg errungen,

Bis sich des Lichtes Pforte aufgeschlossen.

Dir waren heimisch unsres Welttheils Zungen:

Was Hellas, Rom unsterbliches geschrieben,

Juvan 40

Des Britten Lied begeistertes gesungen,

Der Lusitanier, Spanier, heiß im Lieben,

Der Italiener, Deutsche und Franzose

Geschaffen von der innern Gluth getrieben,

Das sprach zu dir im lieblichen Gekose

Der Muttersprache. Im sarmatschen Norden,

Wohin gerufen dich des Schicksals Loose,

Hast du gelauscht des Mickiewicz Accorden,

Und was der Čeche, Serbe und der Russe

Ans Licht gefördert, ist dir kund geworden.

Mnemosyne hat dich mit ihrem Kusse

Geweihet zu des Vaterlandes Frommen,

Um auszuspenden von dem Überflusse.

(Prešeren, Zbrano delo 2: 97, emphases added)

From the above enumeratio of European literatures that Čop

had aesthetically enjoyed and studyed we can see that Prešeren,

too, was aware of the dawning of Goethean world literature. In

the space of Weltliteratur, the core European traditions – Greco-

Juvan 41

Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, and French – were opening the

door to newcomers; that is, to the emerging national literatures

of European peripheries, including Slovenian belles-lettres.

In light of this, Prešeren developed a poetic language

saturated with the voices, stories, images, and forms of European

literature that were available to him in Čop’s personal library

and the library of the Ljubljana lyceum, where Čop worked as a

librarian (Juvan, “World Literature”). Intertextually absorbing

this semiotic material from the European literary tradition and

modernity, Prešeren’s poetic voice internalized the polyphony of

historical periods, languages, and cultural spaces. With this

voice, backed by the universal chorus of the European hyper-

canon, he was able to articulate a highly individual experience,

which paradoxically presents itself as generic: it is the voice

of Prešeren’s poetic singularity that – to paraphrase Althusser

(170–186) – has interpellated other individuals, its addressees,

to become subjects of the nation. In addition to Prešeren’s

implicit and explicit political themes, aside from his poetic

narration of the nation (e. g., in his historical Byronic verse

tale Krst pri Savici [The Baptism on the Savica] of 1836), it is his

Juvan 42

cosmopolitan intertextuality, imaginarily worlding his position

of the Slovenian classic, that played the role of national

allegory.

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Juvan 46

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Abstract

Jameson’s concept of modern third-world literature as nationalallegory is also pertinent for the 19th century peripheries ofthe first-world literature. Aware of their dependence on imperialpowers, the protagonists of (semi)peripheral national movementslonged for the recognition of their nascent collective identityby the lawgiving Other – the symbolic order of ‘universal’tradition. The figures of “national poets” (Nemoianu) wereinvented to represent their respective nations to the gaze of theOther, symbolized by the emerging world literature and empoweredthrough the inter-state system dominated by the core countries.In a secular parallel to the canonization of saints in theCatholic Church, “worlding” (Kadir) a national poet was crucialin the (unfulfilled) longing for his/her universal acknowledgmentas belonging to the hyper-canon. While several national poetsinvolved in national movements showed a “vernacular” tendency(Terian), Schiller and Goethe represented the more “cosmopolitan”model of a national classic. Such ‘affiliation’ to the universalaesthetic canon is also characteristic of the politics ofSlovenian romantic movement and its poet, France Prešeren.Although Prešeren’s poetry, which was exposed to Austriancensorship, only sparsely employs an explicit politicaldiscourse, his imaginary worlding and intertextual transfer ofuniversal aesthetic repertoires from the established literaturesinto a Habsburg periphery fashioned a cosmopolitan strategy ofcultural nationalism. Prešeren has been venerated in Sloveniasince the late-19th century as the singular national classicwhose oeuvre compensates for the apparent lack of classical andmodern traditions in Slovenian and deserves to be recognizedworldwide.

Keywords

national poet, romanticism, cultural nationalism,cosmopolitanism, world literature