Marko Juvan and Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson
Although the conditions of today’s scholarly work force literary scholars to fragment their curiosity and intellect into pre-planned, well-policed, and underfinanced forms of research projects, with which they strive to survive in the global twilight of the humanities, the genealogy of the present volume testifies to the importance of coincidence, inspiration, friendship, and strenuousness of thinking within the republic of letters. Through them, and with a little help from EEA grants and the Slovenian Research Agency’s research funding, the initial intuitions and fortuitous encounters resulted in a continual international collaboration that produced valuable comparative research in the theory and history of European national poets. This volume is a fruit of this endeavour.
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Sveinn Yngvi remembers how it all began:
On a lovely summer day at the turn of the new century, I accompanied my wife, who is a doctor, to Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she was to give a talk at a medical conference. We went for a walk in the old town centre and came across a square where some young people had gathered. They were relaxing and chatting at the foot of a large statue of a man and a muse, who was holding a laurel branch above the man’s head. Engraved on the pedestal was the name of the poet France Prešeren (1800–1849). The next day, while my wife was attending the conference, I continued walking through the old town and went into a store that sold second-hand books. I bought a slim and worn edition of Prešeren’s poems in an English translation, not being able to read them in the original. Sitting outside one of the coffee houses on the banks of the Ljubljanica River, I read through the volume in the summer sun. The poems looked strangely familiar in subject matter, tone, and form. They were Romantic and nationalistic, often tinged with melancholy and longing, which was elegantly conveyed through the rhythm and rhyme of intricate sonnets. The occasional poems also struck a chord, especially the convivial ones celebrating friendship. The same applied to the historical poems, some of which amounted to what I
Getting to know the work and life of France Prešeren was like meeting a kindred spirit or counterpart of an Icelandic poet I had studied for years, Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845). There were striking similarities in their character, circumstances, unrequited love, drinking, and, above all, their poetic output and standing as the “national poets” of their respective countries, Slovenia and Iceland. There is also a statue of Jónas Hallgrímsson in downtown Reykjavík, and he is revered in his native country to the point of adoration, just like Prešeren in Slovenia. When I returned home to my native Iceland, I told my friends about this “Jónas doppelgänger” I had found in another small country in Europe. My colleague Jón Karl Helgason was intrigued and offered to join me in researching the national poets of the European nation-states, seeing Jónas and Prešeren as just two of many such writers.
We went to a HERA event in Paris in 2008, looking for research partners, and met Marko Juvan from Slovenia, who was also interested in pursuing such a study. He then introduced us to his colleague Marijan Dović, and the four of us – in the company of Joep Leerssen from the University of Amsterdam, who was launching a grand collective project of the Encyclopedia of the Romantic Nationalism in Europe – embarked on a comparative study of the two poets, developing the idea of “cultural sainthood” in a nationalistic context because we felt it involved secular practices that resembled religious ones. In 2010 we took part in a conference on cultural sainthood in Amsterdam hosted by Joep, and two years later we held a seminar on the topic for a conference of the European Network of Comparative Literary Studies in Macedonia. Marijan and Joep then held another Amsterdam conference on cultural saints in 2015. Our first findings were published in the Slovenian comparative literature journal Primerjalna književnost in 2011, and the following year papers from the conference in Macedonia were published in the volume Literary Dislocations, edited by Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser and Vladimir Martinovski. Jón Karl and Marijan then took the study further and in 2017 published a book together, entitled National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe. What had begun as a comparative study of two poets was now proving to have far-ranging consequences for our understanding of national poets and their cults in various European nation-states. The basic idea of “cultural saints” has been highly useful as a means of analysing and accounting for the commemorative practices of such poets and writers in Europe, and this volume is a very welcome and important addition to this growing field of study.
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As Sveinn Yngvi so vividly recalls, the comparison between the two Romantic poets, the Icelandic Jónas Hallgrímsson and the Slovenian France Prešeren, started from the impression that they were some kind of doubles, living far apart and not knowing about each other. The poets were born and died almost at the same time; both were of peasant origin and obtained higher education in the capitals of the Danish or Habsburg monarchies that ruled their compatriots. In the 1830s, they contributed significantly to almanacs published in their native languages with the aim of establishing a national public sphere. They both experienced emotional turbulence and, with their benign free-thinking bohemianism, aroused suspicion, pity, or indignation, on the verge of social exclusion. Both wrote literature in their free time and earned money in intellectual professions, and both are held to be the leading Romantic poets that shaped the national consciousness. Finally, they were canonized as cultural saints only toward the end of the nineteenth century, and their monuments in the national capitals were erected virtually simultaneously at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although a closer look shows that the content of their work is hardly comparable, the superficial parallels between Jónas and Prešeren are far from insignificant. It is not so much by the substance of their opuses but through their apparently surface similarities that the analogies of their structural functions come to the fore.
As small and dependent literary systems that emerged at the margins of Europe, Slovenian and Icelandic literatures reflect a common phenomenon of the nineteenth-century cultural nationalism that has recently been discussed by Virgil Nemoianu, John Neubauer, Joep Leerssen, and others, most recently by Marijan and Jón Karl in their National Poets, Cultural Saints. Mostly but not exclusively in east-central European and other (semi-)peripheral literatures of the Romantic and post-Romantic period, the canonization of national poets provided the nation building with key ideologemes. The public discourse, education, philology, editing, and literary history of the individual national movements and communities immortalized the work of such poets by treating it
Through their work and its canonization, national poets made it possible for modern national communities to concretize their ideology in a shared repertoire of poetic images, narratives, and sayings. Instituting national poets, these communities imaginarily overcame internal class antagonisms, surmounted regional or dialectal differences, and developed a common public sphere in a standard language based on the vernacular. On the other hand, national poets were instrumental in facing the anxieties of the competing European nationalisms. In the international arena, the icon of a national poet proved that a nation – especially if deprived of statehood – was equal to other established nations in spite of an obvious shortage of cultural capital. A national genius was regarded a modern classic entitled to join the post-medieval canon of Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare.
In many aspects, the canonization of poets as national cultural saints appears to be similar to religious practices. Many of us considered this process a modern and secular parallel to the tradition of the ecclesiastical sanctification procedure. That process normally results from the recognition of exemplary and exceptional virtues in the life of some tried individual and from communal reliance on his or her inexplicable power that is believed to help the lives of others. Just like local and grassroots efforts at declaring someone’s sainthood because of such qualities need to be confirmed by a supreme
Once the poet’s nation-building legend and key texts had been institutionalized within the national community as a kind of aesthetic lingua franca – that is, a canonical poetic language that allows for diverse, even contradictory appropriations by different classes, sociolects, and generations – they were embraced by discourses, places, and rituals of cultural memory. For several decades, the national poet’s canonical opus continued to provide points of reference to successive reinterpretations of national identity. Consequently, a national poet’s key texts often engendered a long-lasting intertextual series of adaptations, allusions, quotes, and rewriting in literature, music, visual arts, and film.
As learned from Virgil Nemoianu’s seminal study “‘National Poets’ in the Romantic Age” (2002), the institution of the national poet operates on the threshold between an individual national literature and the general space of world literature. Seen from the world-system viewpoint (as proposed around 2000 by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti), the analogies between the Slovenian and Icelandic cultural saints appear to be corollaries of the nineteenth-century emergence of peripheral literary systems on the scene dominated by major European literatures whose widely spoken languages, imperial background, extensive cultural influence, and long-lasting continuity embodied
Through the figure of the national poet, the Icelandic and Slovenian educated class adjusted to the historical conditions of imperial dependence the pan-European processes of autonomizing and nationalizing literature that Siegfried J. Schmidt discussed in his 1989 book Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (The Self-Organization of the Social System’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century). As a discourse intended primarily for aesthetic consumption, literature was abandoning its religious and educative functions, and assuming the character of autotelic, imaginative, free, and individualized expression. As a discourse that cultivates vernaculars, imbuing them with allegedly universal aesthetic forms, semantic complexity, lexical richness, and grammaticality, literature asserted its public role and attempted to counter the dominance of imperial languages. Occupying the public sphere, vernacular belles-lettres disseminated a range of representations that the nascent national community perceived as its essentials. Finally, with its media, social networks, and establishments, literature evolved to a social sub-system on its own. Paradoxically, and as the sociologist Rastko Močnik put forward in his 2006 study Julija Primic v slovenski književni vedi (Julija Primic in Slovenian Literary Studies), it was precisely the presumed aesthetic autonomy of literature that best served the political needs of nation-building. Striving simultaneously for aesthetic autonomy and national thought, the Slovenian and Icelandic literary systems aimed to help their dependent national communities achieve a sort of cultural and administrative-political autonomy within their two foreign-language-speaking monarchies (i.e., the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Denmark), whereby both national movements not only established organizations and media of their own, but also relied on and made use of the educational system, cultural institutions, and the public sphere of the ruling regime.
Granted, Icelandic and Slovenian literatures are geographically distant and belong to different language groups. The two early nineteenth-century authors probably knew next to nothing about each other. However, precisely because of the absence of rapports de fait between the Slovenian and Icelandic Romantic literary cultures, their juxtaposition has proven to be a case in point for a