Slavica Tergestina 24 (2020/I)

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.

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.

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.

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 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.