Directions, Examples, and Incentives: Slovenian Playwriting in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Around 1860 two distinguished Slovenian cultural and political figures discussed matters of a literary nature and national importance. One of them, the young and ambitious liberal Josip Vošnjak (1834–1911), had taken up writing a verse drama; the other, the somewhat older conservative Luka Svetec (1826– 1921), thought it was too soon for such an endeavor.1 In his opinion (which had been molded by the lyceum of the Austrian type) drama was the epitome of literature. Due to the complexity of its structure, the concentrated matter, and the necessary staging (i.e., all that went into a developed theater infrastructure), the tested capacity for reproduction, and the suitably cultured audience, drama always held a particularly representative place in the imagery and ideology of any Central European national space, transcending the artistic sphere. Impressive theatrical buildings of the nineteenth century, which were usually built in a historicizing fashion, were a monument of a sort to this very conception. They were meant to create an impression that it had always been thus. However, only three generations earlier – a mere century – drama and theater were not concerned with such preconceptions. For Slovenes, who, as a modern national community, had not established themselves along the historicizing lines of a grand tradition and its associated appeal, but rather with a vision of an emancipated future, the forgetting of the past in the nineteenth century was somewhat understandable. Nationalistic leaders who often felt compelled to create dramatic oeuvres, thus expressing their cultural and political leadership and imposing personalities, found it helpful (at least initially) to treat the past as needing denial – and only denial. It was only later that they were able to acknowledge that they were not in fact the first to have done everything. Josip Vošnjak thus wrote a theatrical piece at the pinnacle of his career in which he quoted the entire comedy Županova Micka (Micka, the Mayor’s Daughter) by Anton Tomaž Linhart (1756–1795) of 1789, adding an introduction and an ending which addressed the circumstances in which the comedy was premiered.2