American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

The Day Tito Died: Contemporary Slovenian Short StoriesReview by: Timothy PogacarThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 317-318Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/309405 .

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Reviews 317

The second article, "Die slowenische Moderne im 'Erwartunghorizont,' " is, in fact, a nice illustration of the domestic Slovene resonance of foreign literary models and ideas, primarily French and Austro-German, discussed in the first. It opens with perhaps unnecessary reference to reception theory (since the readers are Slovene critics and writers) and traces chronologically what was understood by the terms naturalism, fin de siecle, decadence, (German) Moderne, and symbolism. The novelist and critic Josip Stritar cast the discussion in moral terms (in 1885) until others, such as Karel Hoffmeister and Fran Govekar, gave positive assessments of the Czech phenomenon and Slovene writers such as Ivan Cankar and Oton Zupancic created Slovene variants. Bernik finds the preponderantly unfriendly view of Modernism in the decade prior to Cankar and Zupanviv's collections of 1899 typical of a relatively smaller literature's initial reception of change from abroad. The article is more thoroughly annotated than the first.

Nearly one half of "Die Rezeption des Symbolismus in der slowenischen Literatur" centers on Ivan Cankar's brief Symbolist period, 1899-1902. This article neatly completes the three by asserting that the Moderna, and Symbolism in particular, must be seen in light of Slovene socio-literary developments of the preceding half century, foremost among them the carryover of social criticism from underdeveloped, in this sense, realist prose. Symbolism was, then, a mild turn on tradition in form; however, its metaphysical underpinnings did not take root in Slovenia, where social problems were still at a premium in creative writing.

Readers comfortable with the shorthand of literary periodization and acquainted with the personae and works covered will greatly appreciate this volume.

Timothy Pogacar, Bowling Green State University

The Day Tito Died: Contemporary Slovenian Short Stories. London: Forest Books, 1993. $18.85. (paper)

The five writers collected here are doubtless some of those Slovenes most worth reading. Substituting Lela Njatin for Uro' Kal&ici, they are also the same writers, and ten of the same stories, published in a special issue of Litterae Slovenicae in 1991. This collection is valuable because none of the writers are easily available in English and, moreover, the translating by Lili Potpara, Anne (eh, Tamara Soban and Krigtof Kozak is excellent. One key story by Drago Janiar, "Death at Mary-of-the-Snows," was previously published in poor translation. Close comparisons of the originals with their English versions yields extremely few questionable choices. It must be noted that Brane Gradi'nik not only translated his own stories, but reworked them in English; as opposed to the noel fragments which are included here, have not been thus, there are more than linguistic differences between the two variants. Lele Njatin's two stories, as the fragments which are included here, have not been published in Slovene.

An interesting linguistic shift occurs in the first story, where Jan'ar, who widely employs motifs of darkness (tema) and depth (globina) in his fiction, adapts very brief passages from Mikhail Bulgakov's Belaia gvardiia but paraphrases the Russian's narrator to speak of "a force which sometimes tempts us to look over the edge of a precipice, which lures us down into the emptiness" (7), whereas in the Russian the line of sight is up onto a hill. Such textual freedom is not enjoyed by Janiar's protagonist, who escapes the Russia of 1918 only to encounter the Bolsheviks once more across the Mura River in 1945. The story is a captivating reflection on the interplay of life, fate and art, characteristic of Janiar's preoccupation with Central Euro- pean history. The story "Ultima Creatura," describing a businessman's humiliation in Harlem, and "The Jump from the Liburnia," centering on another temptation to descend, contain variations on these themes.

Brane Gradi'nik's "The Life Story" also leads one to ponder the patterning of human life

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318 Slavic and East European Journal

and art, although, the police detective's point of view is interesting of itself and shows Gradi'nik's rare (among Slovenes) talent in crime fiction, of which he has written perhaps the best example, the novel Nekdo drug (1990). Gradi'nik may be the most talented storyteller and translator in this volume. He rendered his own contributions into English, and has translated Chesteron, Dickens, Dickey, Twain, Vonnegut and others into Slovene. In a recent interview, he commented that the fear of communication is the basis of Slovene literature, and so it may be the key to appreciating this collection. Among Gradi'nik's stories here, "Oeopath" and "Mouseday" bear this out in family settings. Unfortunately, the former is marred by the only serious printing error in the book: the replacement of approximately one paragraph with text from Jan'ar's "Ultima Creatura" (47).

The next three writers represented are more than ten years younger than Janiar and Gradi'nik, being born between 1962 and 1963, and while far from homogeneous, their prose demonstrates a generational difference: an interest in the bizarre, in reflections on culture, and occasionally in a radical retreat into self. To use the last of Jani Virk's three stories ("The Door," "Ro'lin and Verjanko" and "Regatta") as an example, a broken love affair leads the main character to begin a subsistence life on the coast, bullishly rejecting female beauty, old friends and their middle class lifestyle. The unexpected is appealing in his stories even if their relatively rapid development does not mesh well with their open endings.

Andrei Blatnik offers even greater dynamism in his stripped down prose. Thematically, he favors high-low and transcultural comparisons ("Kyoto," "Isaac" and "His Mother's Voice"). "Billie Holiday" returns us to the topic of domestic communication. "The Day Tito Died" exemplifies the antipathy toward the banal found in most of Blatnik's stories. Blatnik is, incidentally, himself a skilled translator of American literature and one of the most well- known younger Slovene writers in Europe.

Lela Njatin's contributions are by far the most unorthodox (in purely formal terms) and (thematically) abstract in the volume. "The Dead Perpetually Dream the Truth" and "Why Do these Black Worms Fly Everywhere I am Myself Accidentally" fill only six pages with contemplation of death and desire, leaving the reader wishing for a larger sampling, as with the six pages excerpted from Intolerance, a novel constructed of transposable parts. A brief note on the writer associates her with Neue slowenische Kunst, whose visual artistic subset IRWIN contributes the cover illustration, "Fight Against Gravitation." Fortunately, this col- lection's contents are more artistically varied and vibrant than the Slovene Postmodernist IRWIN, which employs folk, religious and communist icons to make kitsch out of kitsch.

The publishers deserve credit for bringing out what is truly contemporary Slovene short prose in good translation. Two of Janciar's stories were first collected in book form in Slovene in 1991, and two of Virk's in the same year; nothing in the collection is older than the mid- 1980s. While some observers have posited that the moods evinced by the plights of their characters may partially harken back to past politics, what was Yugoslavia is, happily, absent from this book aside from the title on the cover and the very last story. The Day Tito Died should be of most interest to readers desiring a glimpse of Slovene Postmodernist writing, from the individual first identified with it (Gradi'nik) to its latest unfoldings in minimalism (Blatnik) and allegory (Njatin).

Timothy Pogacar, Bowling Green State University

Aleg Debeljak. Anxious Moments. Translated from the Slovene by Christopher Merrill (with the author). Fredonia, NY: White Pines Press, 1994. 77 pp. $12.00 (paper).

Aleg Debeljak is one of the more prominent members of the generation of Slovenian writers that came of age during the 1980s. In his homeland, he has proven himself both as a poet and a

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