I begin this review paper
1
with a brief
introduction to the ‘prehistory’ of lit-
erary creativity among Slovenian emi-
grants in other parts of Europe. I shall
then outline the history of Slovenian
emigrant newspapers in western Europe
in the period before the Second World
War and the literary contribution of the
most important authors of that period –
with a special emphasis on Professor Vo-
jeslav Mole, who lived in Krakow. This
will be followed by a concise historical
review of Slovenian emigrant writers in
other parts of Europe who left Slovenia
after the Second World War, where I
shall limit myself to the 16 most notable
authors. I shall conclude by attempt-
ing to shed some light on certain issues
surrounding their literary bilingualism.
The method employed in the paper is
that of the review study: I shall com-
pare the main findings of my own re-
search to date with the relevant findings
of other authors and attempt to sup-
plement them with the results of more
recent research in the context of the sub-
ject under discussion. One new aspect
of this paper is the triple comparison
of the position of the authors covered,
namely a comparison of the position of
emigrant authors in different historical
periods, a comparison of the position
of Slovenian emigrant writers in other
countries of Europe with the position
of Slovenian emigrant writers in other
parts of the world, and a comparison of
their position with that of immigrant
writers in Slovenia.
Early History of Slovenian
Emigrant Literature in Other Parts
of Europe
The early history of Slovenian literary
creativity in other parts of Europe can
be covered by considering three distinct
categories. The first category is the con-
sequence of the fact that all Slovenian
writers who enrolled as university stu-
dents at any time before 1919, the year
Slovenia gained the first university of its
own, did so in other parts of Europe.
Many would remain abroad, meaning
that they found employment there,
wrote and published there, and made
their mark in various parts of the Eu-
rope of that time.
The largest number of Slovenians
of course studied in Vienna, which up
until the founding of the University of
Ljubljana was not ‘abroad’ for them, but
the capital of their homeland. In the six-
teenth century, for example, Slovenian
Slovenian Emigrant Writers
In Other Parts Of Europe
Janja Žitnik Serafin
35
students represented almost a quarter of
all the students enrolled at the Univer-
sity of Vienna, while in 1535 they actu-
ally accounted for more than 70 percent
(Ožinger 1994: 36). Also surprising is
the large number of Slovenian magisters
and university lecturers there, as well as
canons of the Vienna cathedral chapter,
particularly in the sixteenth century,
when their ethnic origin even provoked
the protests of local nationalists (Simo-
niti, 1994: 27). In the sixteenth century
the majority of Slovenians belonging to
the academic circle of Baron Herber-
stein taught at the University of Vienna;
others from his circle made their mark
in other parts of the empire. It was also
more or less in this period that Primož
Trubar and Adam Bohorič, the founders
of standard literary Slovenian, enrolled
at the University of Vienna.
From the eighteenth century onwards
the most important Slovenian writers
and linguists, from the Carniolan reviv-
alists to representatives of the Slovenian
moderna, enrolled at the University of
Vienna. In the earlier periods they in-
cluded almost all the celebrated names.
In the first decade of the 20th century,
too, the remarkably strong generation
of Slovenian academics born between
1876 and 1890, who would later come
to prominence in various branches of
the humanities, particularly literature
and philosophy, studied at the Univer-
sity of Vienna. The same applies to the
last years before the First World War and
the years immediately following it. It is
therefore entirely comprehensible that
some of these writers should have re-
mained in Vienna for a lengthy period,
sometimes several decades, and in some
cases for the rest of their lives. The most
notable among them are Pohlin, Ko-
pitar, Miklošič and the physicist, poet
and essayist Jožef Stefan, who lived in
Vienna until his death in 1893. Others
who studied in Vienna and then took
up employment there included Stritar,
Trstenjak, Murko and Vidic, and later
Kidrič. Prežihov Voranc, who had at-
tended a cooperative college in Vienna
before the First World War, wrote the
majority of his most important works
during his emigrant years between the
wars.
Slovenian students in other parts of
Europe were responsible for a whole
range of Slovenian literary publications
during or shortly after their studies. In
Vienna these ranged from Levstik’s Pav-
liha and Stritar’s Zvon in the 1870s all
the way up to the illegal literary gazette
founded at the University of Vienna
during the Second World War by the
group of Slovenian writers that formed
around Janez Remic (Pibernik 1991).
Even today, the Club of Slovenian Stu-
dents in Vienna (KSŠŠD) periodically
publishes the student paper Punt and
the occasional anthology of works by its
members, for example Smrt samokruh-
nosti: Pesmi in proza (Leben 1993).
Before 1919, when the University of
Ljubljana was founded, many Sloveni-
ans also studied in Graz and Prague and
at universities in Italy, while individual
students also studied at other European
universities. Some remained there and
forged careers for themselves as writers,
teachers or academics. In the period be-
fore the Second World War they func-
tioned as active intermediaries between
Slovenian culture and the culture of
their new homeland.
JANJA ŽITNIK SERAFIN
36
The second category of the earlier his-
tory of Slovenian emigrant literature in
other parts of Europe is not connected
to Slovenians studying at universities
there, in other words to the study years
of Slovenian writers, and is not at all
comparable to the aforementioned cat-
egory of rich literary production, either
in content or in volume. This category
includes the usually anonymous original
emigrant literary writings that appeared
in Slovenian emigrant periodicals in Eu-
rope between the wars. Ten ‘Yugoslav’
emigrant newspapers in which Slove-
nians were involved were published in
western Europe in this period (Drno-
všek 1992: 273–282), and around 20
communist or left-wing workers’ papers,
in which Slovenians were also involved;
some of these papers even had supple-
ments in Slovenian (Drnovšek 1992:
289–302). Of the five Catholic news-
papers for Slovenian emigrants, two
were published in Slovenia and three
in western Europe (Drnovšek 1995:
449). Most interesting from the point
of view of literary contributions are the
monthly Naš zvon (1925–27), published
in Westphalia, and Rafael (1931–1935),
published in Heerlen in the Netherlands
with various subtitles, the last of which
was Glasilo jugoslovanskih izseljencev v
zapadni Evropi (Newspaper of Yugoslav
Emigrants in Western Europe). Despite
the ‘Yugoslav’ in the subtitle, the paper
appeared exclusively in the Slovenian
language. In 1935 the Heerlen-based
Rafael merged with the Ljubljana-based
Izseljenski vestnik and from then on ap-
peared as Izseljenski vestnik Rafael.
The texts in these publications do not
have noticeable artistic ambitions and
are interesting above all as historical
documents in which the experiences and
feelings of Slovenian emigrants, particu-
larly in the mining districts of western
Europe, are reflected in a picturesque
manner. This applies as much to the
attempts at poetry as it does to short
prose works. For this reason Slovenian
emigrants in Westphalia, the Rhineland
and elsewhere greatly enjoyed reciting
these poems at their cultural events, for
example at gatherings of miners’ wives,
etc. Among the authors of literary and
semi-literary pieces in these publica-
tions – mainly poems, sketches, intro-
ductions and essay-like reports on visits
to emigrant communities – who at least
Izseljenski vestnik (Emigration Herald),
1939
AEMI JOURNAL 2013
37
occasionally signed their names, are An-
tonija Rože, who published poems, in-
cluding those for specific occasions (e.g.
Rože 1933), and spoke in public to the
Slovenian community in France, and
the editor of Naš zvon, Janez Evange-
list Kalan (Žitnik 1999: 91). His West-
phalian letters and some introductions
are a typical example of the semi-liter-
ary genre, which might be characterised
as an essay-like combination of literary
and journalistic elements written in a
distinctly individual style. Among ex-
amples of a clearly individual style are
Kalan’s speech in Ljubljana, published
in 1927 (Naš zvon 3 (10): 6). It is, in
fact, from the recognisable style of these
pieces that we are able to conclude that
Kalan is also the author of some anony-
mously published sketches.
The third category of ‘early’ Slovenian
emigrant literature in Europe, which
partially coincides in chronological
terms with the second group, consists of
the finest creators of Slovenian emigrant
literature in Europe in the first half of
the twentieth century, who, however,
did not publish their work in the em-
igrant publications mentioned above.
The most notable of them is the poet,
writer, translator, art historian and clas-
sical archaeologist Vojeslav Mole, who
lived in Kraków for 33 years. Since his
life is closely connected with the Jagiel-
lonian University in Kraków, the host
of this year’s AEMI conference, a brief
biographical outline is appropriate here.
He was born in 1886 in Kanal ob
Soči. While a Gymnasium student he
published literary pieces in Ljubljanski
zvon and Omladina, the latter being
the publication of the Vienna-based
academic society ‘Slovenija’. In 1906,
after passing the Matura examination,
he enrolled at the University of Vienna.
Beginning in the autumn of 1908 he
spent a year attending lectures on Pol-
ish literature and Slavonic linguistics in
Kraków, where he also began to pub-
lish his first scholarly papers. He spent
1909 and 1910 in Rome preparing to
study the history of art, continuing and
concluding his studies in Vienna with a
doctorate in 1912. He then spent a year
travelling around Italy, with the help of
a scholarship from the Austrian govern-
ment, and in the autumn of 1913 took
up a post with the Central Commission
for the Protection of Monuments in Vi-
enna, which assigned him to the conser-
vation office in Split.
Vojeslav Mole (1886 - 1973) The most notable
creator of Slovenian emigrant literature in Europe in
JANJA ŽITNIK SERAFIN
38
At the outbreak of the First World
War he was called up into the Austrian
army, but by September 1914 he was
a prisoner of war in Siberia, where he
would remain for six years. In 1917 he
married Ela, a Polish former colleague
from the university in Kraków, by proxy.
The autumn of 1919 saw him teaching
at the university in Tomsk, where he
attained habilitation. Again in 1919,
he was among the co-founders of the
weekly Slovenian publication Naš list
in Omsk. In the spring of 1920 he re-
turned to Kraków and then, with his
wife, moved to Ljubljana for five years,
taking up a post as professor of classical
archaeology and Byzantine art. In 1925
he and his family moved to Kraków and
remained there for 14 years until the
outbreak of the Second World War, and
for a further 19 years after the war. In
Kraków he was elected to the post of full
professor of the history of the art of the
Slavonic nations at the newly founded
Institute of Slavonic Studies at the Jag-
iellonian University – serving as the In-
stitute’s director from 1936. Following
the German attack on Poland, he and
his family were evacuated to Lvov, from
where they travelled to Ljubljana, where
Mole again became a professor of Byz-
antine studies. After the war he returned
to Kraków and continued to teach at the
Institute of Slavonic Studies. In 1950 he
became the director of the History of
Art Institute at the Jagiellonian Univer-
sity and took up the chair of Medieval
Art.
Mole published three independent
literary works: two poetry collections
and an autobiography. His second col-
lection of poems, entitled Tristia ex Si-
beria (Mole 1920), was written while
he was a POW in Russia. In addition to
literary works he published a whole se-
ries of scholarly works, for the most part
in Polish academic journals. He retired
in 1960. In 1947 he was elected a full
member of the Polish Academy of Sci-
ence in Kraków, and in 1961 he became
a corresponding member of the Slove-
nian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In
1966 he and his wife went to live with
their daughter in Oregon, USA, where
Mole died in 1973.
2
The other significant creator of Slo-
venian emigrant literature in pre-war
Europe was the story writer, poet, lit-
erary historian and critic Janko Lavrin
(1887–1986), for many years professor
of Russian literature at the University
of Nottingham in the United King-
dom. Lavrin, who likewise became a
corresponding member of the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences and Arts and an
honorary member of the international
Society for Slovene Studies published
poems and prose in the Prague-based
publication Domači prijatelj between
1906 and 1909 and, 10 years later, in the
Chicago-based publication Čas. A fasci-
nating collection of his autobiographical
sketches appeared posthumously.
3
Also important in this period is the
work of two Slovenians in France – the
literary and translation work of the art-
ist Veno Pilon (1896–1970) and the
French poetry (12 collections) and some
translations by Vladimir Kavčič, who
wrote under the name of Jean Vodaine
(1921–2006). Both of them – like Mole
and Lavrin – were pre-war emigrants but
the focus of the literary and translation
work of all four writers is situated in the
period after the Second World War.
AEMI JOURNAL 2013
39
Recent History of Slovenian
Literary Creativity in Other Parts
of Europe
With the end of the liberation war
and the victory of the Yugoslav social-
ist revolution in May 1945, more than
20,000 political refugees left Slovenia.
There were many well-established writ-
ers among them who continued to write
and publish even during the refugee
period 1945–50, publishing a number
of periodicals and even printing some
original literary works in refugee camps
in Austria and Italy (Žitnik 2007).
Among those who – either directly from
the homeland or following a period in
the camps – withdrew into European
exile, the most important figures in the
literary field are Vinko Beličič, Stanko
Janežič and Franc Jeza, who lived and
worked in Trieste, Vladimir Truhlar and
Rafko Vodeb, who were active in Rome,
Metod Turnšek, who in 1956 moved
from Trieste to Austrian Carinthia, and
Dimitrij Oton Jeruc, who after periods
living in various parts of Europe finally
settled in Belgium. Some of them, par-
ticularly the clerics, returned to Slovenia
after several decades. Janežič returned in
1969 while Truhlar and Vodeb returned
in the 1970s.
In the early 1950s the successful story
writer Igor Šentjurc moved to Germany,
where he would publish 23 novels in
German, for the most part historical
novels but also romances and crime sto-
ries; some of his works have been trans-
lated into various European languages.
Post-war emigrant authors writing in
both languages – Slovenian and Ger-
man – include Venčeslav Šprager and
Maruša Krese in Germany, the poet Tea
Rovšek-Witzemannin in Vienna and the
late poet and prose writer Milena Mer-
lak Detela and her husband Lev Detela,
who moved to Vienna in 1960. The
poet, prose writer, translator and editor
Lev Detela, the author of 40 books in
Slovenian and German, is among the
more prolific and original contemporary
Slovenian emigrant writers, and without
a doubt among the bolder ones in the
literary sense (Žitnik Serafin 2010). In
recent years Maruša Krese and Lev De-
tela, who first found success in the Ger-
man-speaking world, have also become
well established within the cultural con-
text of Slovenia. In 2008 Maruša Krese
even won the Fabula award, an impor-
tant literary award in Slovenia.
It is also characteristic of other Slove-
nian bilingual writers that, as a result of
the long blockade of Slovenian emigrant
Veno Pilon (1896–1970)
JANJA ŽITNIK SERAFIN
40
literature within Slovenia itself, they in-
itially found success in the language of
their new homeland or in the wider area
in which that language is spoken, and
only then, in most cases from the end of
the 1980s onwards, in Slovenia as well.
Similarly, those who wrote exclusively
in Slovenian first broke through in the
context of the Slovenian emigrant press
and the press of the historical Slovenian
communities just across the borders of
Slovenia, but did not achieve success in
Slovenia itself until the lifting of this
blockade in 1991, when Slovenia be-
came independent. This of course only
applied to ‘political’ emigrants.
Among the post-war emigrant au-
thors living in France, the best known
in Slovenia are the photographer, phi-
losopher and essayist Evgen Bavčar and
the popular bilingual writer Brina Svit
(Brina Švigelj Merat), who has lived in
Paris since 1980. Her novels are pub-
lished by, among others, the prestigious
French publisher Éditions Gallimard,
translations of her works in various lan-
guages are also published elsewhere, and
new editions and new impressions of her
Slovenian works and Slovenian transla-
tions of her French novels are constantly
appearing in Slovenia.
The poet and essayist Ifigenija Simo-
novič lived in England for almost 25
years before returning to Slovenia in
2003. The literary legacy and current
work of Slovenian writers in other parts
of the former Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia are still awaiting a more
serious literary historical and literary
critical evaluation. There are a number
of authors working in Sweden who are
best known for their publications in pe-
riodicals, while they also occasionally
publish books.
4
Among leading Slove-
nian writers, there are also, of course,
some who have spent longer or shorter
periods living in other parts of Europe,
or are still living there, but given their
more or less uninterrupted involvement
in publishing within the context of Slo-
venia, we have never considered them to
be emigrant authors.
In his opening remarks at a round-ta-
ble discussion on Slovenian writers in
the European Union in 2010, Lev De-
tela (2010) pointed out, among other
things, that the situation of Slovenian
writers in Europe or today’s EU differs
in terms of its structural conditions
from the situation of other Slovenian
emigrant authors, above all in Argen-
tina but also in the USA, Canada and
Australia. Typical for Slovenian writers
in other continents is (was) a stronger
involvement in the broader cultural
activities of the Slovenian communi-
German -speaking world, won the 2008 Fabula
award, an important literary award in Slovenia
AEMI JOURNAL 2013
41
ties living there, in emigrants’ organi-
sations with many cultural initiatives
of their own, literary and other events
and, often, their own newspapers. Par-
ticularly in Argentina, Slovenian literary
and cultural activity was given a special
impetus 35 years ago with the founding
of the cultural organisation Slovenska
kulturna akcija and the cultural jour-
nal Meddobje, which brought together
numerous expatriate authors (for the
most part with a Catholic orientation)
who had settled in Argentina after the
Second World War. This journal, which
is still published today, has seen and
occasionally still sees, alongside the
contributions of Argentine Slovenians,
contributions from emigrant authors in
other parts of the Americas, Australia,
Asia and, in individual cases, Europe
and sometimes even Slovenia. Detela
does, however, admit that the energy of
their literary mission has faded signifi-
cantly everywhere in the world, with the
passing of the generation that was very
active in the first decades following the
Second World War.
On the other hand Slovenian emi-
grant authors in Europe were to a cer-
tain extent isolated figures, suggests
Detela, since their situation following
the departure overseas of the main body
of Slovenian anti-communist cultural
figures – and thus after the cessation of
the various cultural and literary activi-
ties in refugee camps in Austria and Italy
– differed from the situation of the more
interconnected and numerous authors
who were members of the historical Slo-
venian minorities in Austria and Italy.
Detela (ibid.) claims: ‘Many emigrant
authors who did not emigrate to Amer-
ica or Australia lived among the Slove-
nians of Trieste, Gorizia and Klagenfurt
or other parts of Austrian Carinthia, but
for various reasons, frequently ideologi-
cal and mental, they remained fairly dis-
tant from Slovenian organisations and
groups in those places. They represented
a kind of unique cosmos, and more or
less remained a special corpus separatum
with unique literary characteristics – for
example Vinko Beličič and Franc Jeza in
Trieste or Metod Turnšek in Carinthia.’
Of course – despite the common ex-
perience of separation from home – lit-
erary isolation and solitude are far more
understandable in the case of Dimitrij
Oton Jeruc in Belgium and Saša Jerman
in England than in that of the emigrant
writers in the historical Slovenian com-
munities outside the borders of Slo-
venia, since Belgium and the United
Kingdom did not have strong Slovenian
communities with a sufficiently ramified
cultural infrastructure to provide the
necessary support to writers with liter-
ary ambitions. Among these solitary fig-
ures or – better – loners, we may include
with little hesitation contemporary and
still active Slovenian literary figures in
other parts of Europe. Although Slove-
nian communities exist in the countries
where these authors live, and although
the activity of these communities con-
tinues even in the present day, these
authors do not as a rule form ties with
them or do so only exceptionally or on a
more or less ad hoc basis.
This does not, however, apply to the
majority of Slovenian authors in Swe-
den, who – quite the opposite – are
characterised by a vital connection with
the Slovenian community there and
with its organisations and societies. A
typical example of an author who is
JANJA ŽITNIK SERAFIN
42
closely involved in the activity of the
Slovenian community in Sweden is
Avguština Budja. Collective anthologies
of Slovenian poetry and prose in Swe-
den, including, for example a Slovenian
anthology from the late 1970s (Budja,
Hriberšek, Jakše and Zavodlov 1979)
and bilingual or multilingual or ‘Yugo-
slav’ anthologies, two from the 1980s
(Šesti festival poezije in proze 1983 and
Sedmi festival poezije in proze 1984) and
one from 1990 (Ett öppet fönster/Odprto
okno), are also eloquent evidence of this.
Literary Bilingualism
For emigrant writers, literary bilingual-
ism of sufficient quality, something that
as a rule is the privilege of the educated,
is the most reliable way of breaking
through to different target audiences. In
Germany, some of the most successful
Slovenian expatriate writers, e.g. Šent-
jurc and Šprager, had practically no con-
nection with the Slovenian community
there, for the most part because they
wished to hedge themselves off from its
internal ideological quarrels. For this
reason, as regards use of their mother
tongue, they lived in linguistic isolation,
which further contributed to their deci-
sion to give up writing in Slovenian and
– in order to succeed in the majority
language of their new homeland – ded-
icate themselves entirely to writing in
German. As mentioned above, Šentjurc
was very successful in this.
Those who became clearly bilingual
writers as emigrants chose a surer but
more difficult route to different read-
ers. Since their personal links with pub-
lishers were weaker, it was usually more
difficult for them to publish in the lan-
guage of the new homeland than it was
for native writers. For the most part they
did not cultivate connections with their
own immigrant community and its
media, which could have made it easier
for them to publish in Slovenian. Con-
sequently, their success depended above
all on their own enterprise, self-pro-
motion and lobbying in the dominant
publishing circles in both the old and
new homelands. More recent authors
of Slovenian origin have also begun to
get involved in foreign-language writers’
societies and cultural organisations. The
socially critical poet and prose writer
Maruša Krese, who divides her time
between Berlin, Graz and Slovenia, has
attracted considerable interest both in
Slovenia and internationally. The author
of several books in Slovenian and Ger-
man, she lives ‘in the global world’ (De-
tela 2010). Literary works in Slovenian
and German have also been published
by the three Vienna-based Slovenian
authors mentioned earlier, and by
Venčeslav Šprager, who lives in Bavaria
and who, having strengthened contacts
with the country of his birth in recent
years, has renewed and consolidated his
knowledge of his mother tongue to such
an extent that he can now publish bi-
lingual works even without the help of
translators and editors (for example the
poetry collection Augenblicke/Trenutki,
Šprager 2006).
Even Brina Svit, ‘our biggest writing
star’ (Hrastar 2006), who in the 1980s
and 1990s published three novels in
Slovenian –
April
(1984), the epistolary
novel
Navadna razmerja
(1988) co-writ-
ten with Peter Kolšek and the novel
Con
brio
(1998), which was nominated for
AEMI JOURNAL 2013
43
the Kresnik award – has in recent years
written works in French and then her-
self translated them into Slovenian, e.g.
the novel Odveč srce (Svit 2006), trans-
lated as Un coeur de trop. By contrast,
her novels Con brio (Svit 1998) and
Smrt slovenske primadone (Svit 2000)
have been translated from Slovenian
into French for Gallimard.
5
Brina Svit,
who is undoubtedly the most produc-
tive Slovenian emigrant author (and
one of the most productive Slovenian
authors in general), has received many
literary awards and prizes, among them
the Académie Française’s
Prix Maurice
Genevoix
for the novel Un cœur de trop
(2006), the Belgian Prix Licorne and
the independent bookshops prize Fo-
lies d’Encre (Topolovec 2008) for the
French version of the novel Coco Dias
ali Zlata vrata (2007).
A number of fine emigrant writers
who wrote exclusively in their mother
tongue – in particular those working in
the first decades following the Second
World War – remained until their deaths
accessible only to members of their own
language community. Since at that time
the majority of European countries did
not yet recognise the principles of inte-
gration and intercultural transience at
the national level, which includes ma-
terial support for the translation and
publication of minority or immigrant
literature, the literary contribution of
post-war Slovenian migrant authors
was marginalised in their new European
homelands. Their literary work in their
mother tongue represents a characteris-
tic and interesting though isolated and
unintegrated foreign body in their new
homeland, which accepted them into
its economic, legal and political system
but not into its culture. Until recently,
immigrant writers in Slovenia were in
a very similar position, since Slovenian
readers did not have an opportunity to
discover their literary work written and
published in their own mother tongues
(Dimkovska 2005). Although some
shorter works have appeared in the liter-
ary journal Paralele (Dimkovska 2006),
which focuses on the writings of minor-
ity authors, Slovenian translations of
their books have been more the excep-
tion than the rule (Mugerli 2005).
In 2010, however, there was a notice-
JANJA ŽITNIK SERAFIN
44
able shift in the attitude of the Slovenian
literary establishment towards immi-
grant authors. Until recently, the statute
of the Slovenian Writers’ Association
(Društvo slovenskih pisateljev; DSP) read
as follows: ‘Any Slovenian writer, poet,
prose writer, dramatist or essayist writ-
ing in Slovenian may become a mem-
ber of the Association.’ With the new
Founding Act of the Slovenian Writers’
Association, debated by members at the
general assembly on 29 March 2010,
this condition has become much more
open: ‘Any Slovenian writer (poet, prose
writer, dramatist, essayist) writing in
Slovenian or in any other language, or
citizen of the Republic of Slovenia or
writer with the right of residence in Slo-
venia who is not Slovenian by nation-
ality but who writes in Slovenian or in
his or her own mother tongue [emphasis
mine] may become a member of the As-
sociation. Slovenian writers who do not
live in the Republic of Slovenia may,
regardless of citizenship, become mem-
bers of the Association under the same
conditions’ (Founding Act of the DSP
2010: 3).
I believe that an amendment of this
kind may accelerate, at least slightly,
positive processes in Slovenian culture,
which is evidently still in the transitional
period of forming the intercultural con-
sciousness and multicultural national
identity of its members. Perhaps writers
who have come to Slovenia from other
countries will gain, also through mem-
bership of different Slovenian cultural
and literary organisations, concrete new
opportunities to establish themselves
more widely in the culture of their new
homeland.
Conclusion
Today there are almost no Slovenian
writers left of the generation that emi-
grated from Slovenia to other parts of
Europe at the end of the Second World
War. ‘We are actually standing on the
graves of this unique literary phenom-
enon, which was still very much alive
in the 1960s and 1970s,’ writes Detela
(2010). According to the poet, writer
and dramatist Lev Detela – who, fol-
lowing his emigration to Austria in
1960 himself relied on the global Slo-
venian diaspora community, and who
is still today co-editor of Meddobje, the
Buenos Aires-based journal of Slove-
nian emigrant culture around the globe
– the energy of the literary mission of
post-war Slovenian emigrants is fading
everywhere because the generation that
was so active in the first decades follow-
ing the Second World War is dying out.
And yet Detela, who considers himself
one of the ‘last representatives of the
so-called second wave of emigrant Slo-
venian writers, who, before the democ-
ratisation and independence of Slovenia
were not recognised in their homeland’,
is a surprising example of an artist whose
energy, even after half a century of con-
tinuous writing and publishing, shows
no signs of fading. Quite the opposite:
in recent years his annual average num-
ber of new books has actually increased.
To a slightly lesser extent this also ap-
plies to his Slovenian contemporaries
in other parts of Europe. In 2009, three
years after her award-winning prose col-
lection Vsi moji božiči, Maruša Krese re-
turned with a new collection, Vse moje
vojne. Last year, after a break of five
years, Pavelhaus in Graz published a new
novel by Venčeslav Šprager in Slovenian
AEMI JOURNAL 2013
45
and German (Šprager 2011 and 2011a).
Both are, in fact, maintaining a slightly
less intense pace of publication than
that which characterised earlier phases
of their writing careers. This does not
apply to the practically uninterrupted
creative momentum of Brina Svit, the
youngest of the authors covered here.
Good-quality creative bilingualism
remains the best assurance of a visible
presence in two literary and cultural
systems. The internal visibility of liter-
ary works within the context of an in-
dividual migrant community, which
until recently was still very important
for conserving Slovenness among em-
igrants, simply no longer functions
in today’s increasingly ‘loose’ migrant
communities. Perhaps it will turn out
that the once productive collective en-
ergy of Slovenian migrant communi-
ties has a suitable counterweight in the
remarkable individual motivation of
the most successful individuals, among
them contemporary Slovenian emigrant
writers, in particular those who, lacking
the support of the social and cultural
network of a Slovenian community in
their new homeland, were first com-
pelled to establish themselves, entirely
independently, in a language that was
foreign to them before they could at-
tract attention with their literary work
in Slovenia itself.
This sad rule does not apply to im-
migrant authors in Slovenia. For them,
the exact opposite applies: it is easier for
immigrant writers who were well estab-
lished in their native countries before
immigrating to Slovenia to establish
themselves in Slovenia. In other words:
when it comes to including emigrant
and immigrant writers in the group of
prominent writers, or even in the group
of ‘our’ writers, Slovenia is evidently very
cautious. First it waits to see what others
will say. After that, it is much easier and
safer to decide about who deserves our
recognition as well.
Lev Detela, author of ‘Emigrant’ (1999) and many
other books in Slovenian and German, is among
-
nian emigrant writers
JANJA ŽITNIK SERAFIN
46
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Notes
1 This paper is an extended version of the fol-
Dve domovini / Two Home-
lands
2
3 In addition to entries in Slovenski biografski
leksikon Enciklopedija Slovenije Enciklopedija
Jugoslavije
4
-
5
Con brio
Mort d’une
prima donna slovène
-
Moreno
Un cœur de trop
Coco Dias ou La porte dorée
Petit éloge de la rupture
written in French
JANJA ŽITNIK SERAFIN
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