Bartol’s Al Araf and the “National Issue”

Abstract

Slovenian literary critics and historians have long viewed Vladimir Bartol’s collection of short stories Al Araf as the work of an author that wrote cosmopolitan and typical non-Slovenian literature and placed cognitive and ethical relativism under the influence of Descartes, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche at the forefront rather than national issues. Only more recent studies have begun treating Bartol’s early novellas differently; they perceive some typical Slovenian literary constants in them, including a strong ethnic component. This article elucidates this gap between older and more recent interpretations by relying heavily on poorly known and hitherto nearly unstudied manuscripts from Bartol’s estate as well as published documentation. The commonly held impression is that while writing his collection Bartol treated the ethnic issue solely as one of the many ideas he experimented with in his stories. This was also how his contemporaries understood him at that time and failed to identify tones colored with a nationalist idea in his stories. In contrast, more recent explanations draw attention to specific places in Al Araf’s main cycle that focus on this very idea of strengthening and establishing a nation. These interpretations can also find firm support in Bartol’s postwar self-explanation and especially in the fact that the writer’s novellas thematized the type of subjectivity that Slovenians needed to carry out great historical changes and in some way predicted these changes.