Slavica Tergestina 24 (2020/I)

The article inspects the political character of the 1968 events in Yugoslavia against the background of culturalised interpretations of this watershed year in post-foundational theory and aesthetics. The article presupposes that to interpret the global 1968 in terms of an emergence of the political as an aesthetic, cultural subversion of outdated politics would result in a myopic conclusion that 1968 did not happen at all in Yugoslavia. Why is this so? In order to pursue this rather banal but pertinent question, the opposition between politics and the political will be extended along the lines of the dialectics of evolution and revolution. It is precisely the continuity of politics that can help us explain why the Yugoslav 1968 did not usher in formations that in the West were subsequently theorised as pertaining to the notion of the political.

This article addresses the formal resolution of the crisis which emerged in early 1968 within the editorial board of the Slovenian scholarly and literary journal Problemi. It attempts to follow and analyse the new mechanism of censorship which followed the abolishment of a number of literary journals in the past by the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Slovenia. The formal fragmentation of the idea of a general cultural journal into separate divisions (philosophy, literature, sociology, literary criticism) introduces an innovative scheme of atomisation of responsibility— and with it the journal’s major influence on the political processes in Slovenia.

Milan Kundera’s success in the 1980s was partly due to his essays, which critiqued Cold War-era Europe from both east and west and helped revive the concept of Central Europe. He was one of three Czech writers to win Slovenia’s Vilenica Prize in the first eight years of its existence, along with Jan Skácel and the Czech-German Libuše Moníková. Following the award granted to Pavel Vilikovský (the only Slovak laureate to date) in 1997, Czech and Slovak writers did not win the Vilenica for nearly twenty years until Jáchym Topol’s prize in 2015. This article examines these Czech and Slovak writers as both novelists and critics of the late socialist period, reflecting the historical experience of a region of small nations surrounded by global powers.

One way to connect the events of 1968 to those of 1989 is by rereading those who have theorised the artistic significance of the events in their immediate present: Aleksandar Flaker around 1968, and Aleš Erjavec and Marina Gržinić around 1989. These thinkers created models which, used together, can help us grasp the causality that connects 1968 to 1989. Three hypotheses will be proposed: first, there is a development leading directly from the anti-protestant ethics of pleasure of the 1960s to the commodified desire of the 1980s to migrate from socialism to the shopping mall; second, there is a link between the upcoming literary generation’s struggle against canonical national literature in the 1960s and the nationalist programme championed by the same writers in the 1980s; third, whereas Slovenian literature produced only marginal cases of the 1968 model, its so-called alternative culture of the 1980s was an exemplary case of the European East as such.

The article analyses the developments in Slovenian theatre between 1968 and 1985. It follows the careers of Dušan Jovanović, playwright and director, and Lado Kralj, director and professor of comparative literature, as members of the generation that entered the public sphere around 1968 and went on to radically change the Slovenian theatre of the 1970s and 1980s. The analysis shows that the main goals of the student movement—freedom of speech and of artistic expression as well as social change—were also at the heart of the artistic revolution that started in 1969 before it was developed by experimental theatre groups (Glej and Pekarna) and finally adopted by theatre institutions (the Mladinsko Theatre and the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana).

This paper examines how the demand for freedom was fulfilled in Milan Jesih’s poetry from different periods, paying particular attention to the origin of the label ludism. In the broader perception, language play was central to Slovenian ludism, but it flourished without a clear link to Derrida’s concept of the play of signification or Heidegger’s idea of being as play. A comparison of Jesih’s poetry collections Uran v urinu, gospodar! (Uranus in the Urin, Master!), Soneti (Sonnets) and Maršal (Marshal) shows that all three books open up space for carnivalisation, as they connect the high with the low, and the comical with the serious. This happens against the background of belief in the autonomy of art. Freedom remained an imperative in Jesih’s poetic oeuvre, which made his poetry comparable to play. The notion of ludism thus seems appropriate both in conceptual and stylistic terms.

The article presents the transformative potentials of Jure Detela’s political thought on the basis of the texts that emerged from his social activism. In the period of the student movement, Detela established himself on the political left; his initial works are marked by a socialist political perspective, and later he became receptive to the political ideas of anarchism. In the 1980s, Detela was the first in the Slovenian public sphere to criticise imprisonment as the predominant mode of punishment and to demand the abolition of the death penalty. He developed arguments against the death penalty on the basis of an understanding of the interrelatedness of personal and structural violence. In the complex context of the disintegration of the Yugoslav socialist system and the accompanying socio-political changes, Detela began to conceive the Pacifist Alliance social movement. His concept of pacifism is very close to A. J. Muste’s concept of revolutionary pacifism; in both cases, pacifism is intertwined with justice—Detela disdained the search for peace without it.

This article discusses the relation between second-wave feminism and Slovenian literature, focusing on the poetics of female authors. It begins by addressing the relations between the 1968 student movement and the struggle for women’s emancipation, particularly the literary and theoretical innovations of women in France with an emphasis on the symbolic position claimed by the authors around the écriture féminine circle. After presenting the second wave of the women’s movement in Slovenia, the article sketches out the Slovenian reception of écriture féminine and sets up the framework for a further exploration of the emergence of écriture féminine among poets in the period 1964–1980. During that period, there was no Slovenian equivalent of écriture féminine. However, as écriture féminine was emerging in France, some emancipatory stirrings in Slovenian poetry were felt, particularly in the work of two female poets of an earlier generationand one author who had participated in the student movement.

The 1930s and the 1980s were both marked by major and significant social crises that would eventually usher in two different kinds of society. The crisis of the 1930s resulted in the Second World War. Its particular outcome in Slovenia and Yugoslavia was the development of a multinational federal state and socialism. The crisis of the 1980s eventually led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Slovenian secession and the transition to capitalism. The aim of this article is to compare these two periods. The national programme is seen as the key here. For, unlike in the 1940s, a significant portion of the social movements of the 1980s simply lacked one.

There are many accounts of student protests from 1968 that have been written by the witnesses of events, and there are also many studies conducted by experts in various fields, but the event itself is difficult to place in wider political narratives. However, the event still seems important for several reasons: it was neither expected nor foreseeable; the mobilisation of the protesters was spontaneous and sudden; key issues included anti-imperialism and corruption; meetings, demonstrations, tracts became everyday life of the protesters; and there was a mix of anarchistic liberalism and practical organisation. Hence, the challenge of re-politicisation seems to be the main heritage of May ’68 as a type of contradictory ferment. Focusing on student protests in Belgrade and their subsequent echoes, this article attempts to shed light on the structural reasons for the discrepancy between the complexity of events and the poverty of experience, or between the politics of memory and the remembrance of politics.

Slavica Tergestina was founded in 1987 at the University of Trieste by scholars of the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (SSLMIT – Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori). After the introductory volume published in 1987, the journal appeared regularly beginning in 1994. Since then, eighteen volumes have been published, adding up to over 250 articles written by researchers from different countries (mostly Russian, Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian and Italian Slavic scholars). The volumes were reviewed in several scientific publications in Russia, Italy, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia. Some volumes focused on a monographic topic: Наследие Ю.М. Лотмана, 1996; Славянские языки и перевод, 1997; Художественный текст и его гео-культурные стратификации, 2000; Литературоведение XXI века. Письмо – Текст – Культура, 2002, Law & Literature, 2011; The Great Story, 2012; Slavia Islamica, 2013; The Yugoslav Partisan Art, 2016. Most of the articles published so far deal with the cultural realm of the Slavic world from the perspective of modern structuralist, semiotic and cultural methodological approaches, but the Journal Slavica TerGestina remains open to other approaches and methodologies.

This article focuses on the question of how the activities of the intellectuals in the 1960s were observed and evaluated by the leading politicians of the Communist Party of Slovenia. The negative reputation that the Slovenian political leadership acquired with its rough intervention in the cultural scene in 1964 was the foundation for the consideration of how to avoid such scandals in the future. In the second half of the 1960s, the League of Communists of Slovenia commissions for ideological questions were led by people who defined the role of intellectuals in society in an entirely different manner than the older generation of communists. Hence, as long as this group of politicians prevailed in the Slovenian political leadership, the door was open for diversity in the sphere of culture.