Burning Erotika and Ivan Cankar’s Revolution in Slovenian Poetry

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, Slovenian literature was shaken by the emergence of the so-called “moderna” generation of neo-Romantic poets and writers, among whom the most famous names are Josip Murn, Dragotin Kette, Ivan Cankar, and Oton Župančič. Among them, Cankar’s poetry collection Erotika (Erotica) stirred up by far the most dust—especially because its publication was accompanied by an infamous reception scandal. Cankar’s book debut, the genuine fruit of decadent poetics, was bought up and burned by the bishop of Ljubljana, Anton Bonaventura Jeglič, immediately after its publication in March 1899. This intervention, which the liberal press used for a frontal attack on the “inquisitorial” mentality of Slovenian clerics and conservatives in general, brought the ambitious young man of letters into the limelight—as a harbinger of the erotic revolution in Slovenian poetry. This article begins with an outline of the course of the famous censorship episode and then uses a close reading of Erotika—especially the most problematic cycle “Dunajski večeri” (“Viennese Evenings”)—to show why the collection had to be burned. As a brief comparison with the judicially banned poems from Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil shows, the bishop’s intervention cannot really be considered censorship in the strict sense, since it was not (anymore) supported by the state apparatus of repression: Jeglič does not appear in this episode as an all-powerful inquisitor, but rather as a caricatured censor without real executive power. Only a few years later, however, Cankar was also painfully hit by official imperial censorship.