SLOVENE WRITING AFTER INDEPENDENCE

AT THE TURN OF the millennium, Slovenia appears to have an enviable position among the newly independent states of Southern and Central Europe. The grip of the Yugoslav Communist Party was somewhat looser than that of comparable parties in the Soviet Bloc, and the transition to capitalism and democracy went more smoothly than in other Slavic states. Slovenia was the most modern and most prosperous of the former Yugoslav republics (8 percent of the population produced 20 percent of the GNP); and, in comparison with its neighbors to the south, it suffered very little from the disintegration of Yugoslavia which it initiated in 1991. Now, according to Euromoney's ranking for country risk, Slovenia places ahead of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, thirty-third to Austria's ninth ("Facts," 4). It is on the fast track for NATO and EU membership and is systematically shifting its orientation and its public image from the Balkans to Central Europe. Better still, except for the Serbs, who call the Slovenes Western lackeys, there seems to be no governmental animosity toward Slovenians, even those who constitute minorities in the Trieste region in Austria and Italy, though Slovenians think that Italians take every opportunity to remind them of their occupation of the Littoral. Some border problems with Italy and Croatia remain to be worked out, but these disputes do not appear to be heated. On the streets, there are numerous signs of individual prosperity. As Iztok Osojnik says, the country may be poor, but the people are not.

Even the writers do not complain as much as their colleagues in Slovakia and Hungary, though when told this they seem disconcerted and perhaps a little offended. But their situation is different. From the eighth century until 1991, Slovenes were a nation rather than a state, held together by language and culture rather than by self-generated political structures. This feeling is so strong that, in a country perhaps 80 percent Catholic, the door of Ljubljana's cathedral features the first three books printed in Slovene about five centuries ago -- all Protestant. From the nineteenth century on, writers like France Preseren, Ivan Cankar, and Edvard Kocbek served as creators, conservators, and transmitters of Slovene identity, and their names and likenesses are prominent on street signs, public monuments, and currency. Slovenia not only has a high literacy rate, but the people actually read: in 1999, libraries circulated eight to ten million books to a total population of two million, and a person who reads fewer than ten books a year is not regarded as a serious reader.

Moreover, since 1945, and especially in the decade before independence, writers continued to serve as the conscience of the Slovene people: they were in the forefront of movements for a free and democratic Slovenia, like the founders of the soon-suppressed magazine Revija 57; in 1998 the Committee for Freedom of Speech and Writing, associated with the Slovenian Writers Association, sponsored a group whose members wrote a draft that was the...