Abstract
This paper center-stages the canonization of two key figures of Slovenian poetry, each of the early nineteenth century: Valentin Vodnik and France Prešeren, and the placement of their statues in the public space of Ljubljana, capital of the Habsburg province of Carniola. Late in the nineteenth century, monuments to “cultural saints” became an important symbolic battlefield for the Slovenian national movement, striving for greater cultural and political autonomy. More broadly understood, Ljubljana turns out to be a paradigmatic example of how the literal battle for the nationalization of the city was fought through the occupation of public space by statues of “great men of literature.” The struggle, then, adopts semiotic significance. The Carniolan capital would eventually become a spiritual metropolis of “Slovenedom,” densely sown with far-reaching monumental symbols.
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Notes
Certainly, the capital is the most prestigious venue, but mnemotopes are certainly not created there exclusively. Within the project “Space of Slovenian Literary Culture,” funded by the Slovenian research agency (ARRS), a team of experts is mapping the geographic spread of the network of public monuments dedicated to literary artists as one of the important spatial features of Slovenian literary culture. The research for this article was partly financed by this project.
Cf. the website of the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms (SPIN, http://www.spinnet.eu) and Leerssen (2006).
On national poets, see Nemoianu (2002) and the set of papers in the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (vol. 4) with an excellent introductory overview (Neubauer 2010a, b). On the concept of cultural saints, see (Helgason 2011a; Dović 2012, and the website of Cultural Saints of European Nation States (CSENS, http://vefir.hi.is/culturalsaints).
Just as a network of Christian shrines once covered early medieval Europe, towards the end of the nineteenth century a dense grid of mnemotopes and christenings related to cultural saints was created to connote the spaces of the “Europe of nations.”
Although an important impulse was given by the French Revolution (cf. Ozouf 1991), the veneration of cultural saints reached its first peak in the mid-nineteenth century. After 1848, it mushroomed throughout the continent, especially in the form of the “cult of the centenary”; very often, new monuments were the venues of impressive large-scale rallies whose success sometimes surprised their organizers (cf. Quinault 1998; Rigney 2011).
All the translations from Slovenian to English are by the author.
Josipina’s report was published in Dom in svet [12.19 (1899), p. 608], at the time when the campaign for the Prešeren monument in Ljubljana was at its height.
In contrast to many other translations of corporeal remains, this reburial had no traits of relic veneration that would resemble the Christian cult of saints: in fact, the translation itself was not included in the ceremony, but was performed prior to it. On the other hand, the cases of Mickiewicz, Mácha, and Hallgrímsson, who were reburied at later stages of canonization, show clear traits of relic veneration (see Koropeckyj 2010; Pynsent 2010; Helgason 2011a, b).
A detailed account of the ceremony by Malavašič was published promptly in Novice (February 10 and 17) and later reprinted in Costa’s Vodnikov spomenik. Lucid and ironic analysis of this symptomatic and sometimes hilarious report was supplied by Močnik, who emphasized not only that the ideological discourse of the Old Slovenians, focused on language and literature, attempted to “bind a multitude of addressees into a nation” (Močnik 1983, p. 211), but also revealed how it sought to open up a specific place of utterance, aiming to present a particular group of “non-selected leaders” as the national representatives: “The ceremony was a success; it managed to turn Vodnik’s poems into an elevator that lifts [the national elite] at least to the upper floor of the Žibert house [i.e., the Vodnik home in Šiška]” (Močnik 1983, p. 215).
In the Introduction (“Predgovor”), the only text published in both Slovenian and German, Costa asserted that he was “publishing this work in honor of our nation and in solemn memory of one of its champions” (Costa 1859, p. x). What followed were the miscellanea of dozens of articles on Vodnik’s life and work, of commemorative (or new) poems, various reports, and so on, in either Slovenian or German.
In fact, Vodnik himself had already considered such an idea, as some manuscript versions of this poem testify (see Vodnik 1988, pp. 393–394).
After Etbin H. Costa, the mayor of Ljubljana from 1864 to 1869, the 1870 s were dominated by German-oriented mayors (Supan, Deschmann, and Laschan). In 1882, the Slovenian-oriented Peter Grasselli became mayor, and from 1896 to 1910 the city was headed by the liberal Ivan Hribar, a fervent supporter of Slovenian monuments.
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century—in fact, with the erection of the Schiller monument in Stuttgart in 1839—the entire continent was gradually infected with a true monumental epidemic, spreading like a domino effect. This feverish Denkmalwut usually overlapped with centennial commemorations and had a strong focus on cultural and literary greats (cf. Quinault 1998; Neubauer 2010a, b).
For details on the Levstik and Erjavec commemorations, see a variety of anonymous announcements and reports in Ljubljanski zvon [9 (1889), pp. 504, 569–571, 704; 762–763].
In this respect, among the “national poets” within the region the cases of Prešeren, Mácha (Czech), and Eminescu (Romanian) are in a sharp contrast to those more straightforward nationalistic ones such as Botev in Bulgaria or Petőfi in Hungary (see Pynsent 2010; Mihăilescu 2010; Penčev 2010; Neubauer 2010a).
As Miroslav Hroch has demonstrated, this was typical for “Phase C,” the rise of a mass national movement (see Hroch 1993, pp. 6–8).
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Dović, M. “Every monument erected by a nation to its greats is erected to the nation itself”: Vodnik, Prešeren, and the nationalization of the Carniolan capital’s topography. Neohelicon 41, 27–41 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0218-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0218-5