Bartol’s Prewar Short Prose and Anti-Women Views

Abstract

Distinctively anti-women views are typical of Bartol’s prewar short prose (especially in his narratives from the first half of the 1930s). They were already noticed by contemporary criticism, and also by later researchers of Bartol’s oeuvre. These types of observations often motivated the judgments that Bartol’s writing was gynophobic, misogynistic, and even anti-feminist. An overview of Bartol’s diary notes shows that in many ways his personal views on women indeed matched the views of his literary characters. The writer drew his anti-women views from various sources: partly from his personal experience and mainly from the works of authors that were typical in this regard and that he read and often used as a reference (e.g., Machiavelli, Strindberg, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Weininger). Within this context, his friend from his youth and role model Klement Jug was especially important for Bartol. Jug’s anti-women positions are somewhat less known, but they were extremely relevant for Bartol. Both Bartol’s anti-women views and their main sources can be extensively documented. However, these types of views by the author do not necessarily prejudice the expressiveness of his texts. Based on a detailed reading of the novella “Ljubezen Sergeja Mihajloviča” (“Sergej Mihajlovič’s Love”), this article shows that Bartol’s short prose cannot be understood as a thesis propagation of the anti-women doctrine. True, misogyny is one of the informative components of this text, but it does not appear in isolation; it appears in combination with other components that de-monologize, stratify, and relativize the “message”. Through the innovative use of specific narrative procedures, Bartol achieved a problematization of the unambiguous reference of his early short prose, which ultimately also relativizes the power of the anti-women views in it.