Evaluation of Literature in Slovenian Criticism 1918–1945

Abstract

With Ivo Brnčič’s writing, Marxist literary criticism between the two world wars attained a more developed and – towards literary works – less violent conception of “tendency” and “progressiveness” as the two main criteria for the assessment of literature. In spite of his literary sensibility Brnčič, because of his Marxist ideology, saw in literary works an ideological conflict between social classes and their economic backgrounds, with which he denied literature an autonomous status and subjected it to ideological demands. As the most important freethinking literary critic of the time, Josip Vidmar seemingly wanted to detach the assessment of literature from all ideological influences. However, with an assessment criterion, according to which the author’s “a priori” nature was reflected in a literary work – it was supposedly opposed to everything that the artist as a person knew, accepted, and adopted – with this criterion Vidmar changed literature into the scene of his cultural battle with Slovene Catholicism. At the same time, a literary work became for him a medium for gaining insight into an author’s psychology, and literary criticism was an instrument for an ethical judgement of it. Thus Vidmar, like Brnčič, removed literature’s autonomous status, and subjected it to ideological assumptions. – The best contribution to the assessment of literature between the wars can be found in the Catholic literary criticism of France Vodnik. A dilemma of Catholic criticism since the beginning of the 20^th century had been whether to first evaluate the content of literary works (A. Mahnič) or their aesthetic, formal value (Izidor Cankar). France Vodnik creatively overcame this contradiction by saying that the essence of the artistic or “aesthetic” in literary works is a fusion of content and formal elements into a higher unit, “an image of higher synthesis” or artistic “organism”. The idea of a literary work as a complete, indivisible organism became a critical criterion for “synthetic criticism” and also the notion with which he was the first in Slovenia consistently to establish the autonomy of a literary work. The literary criticism of Vidmar and Brnčič, who, each in his own way, reduced literature to either cognitive or ethical elements, can therefore be classified as reductionist. With France Vodnik, Slovene literary criticism between the two wars became an organic type of criticism, which presupposes literature to be an autonomous aesthetic organism.