Slovene Modernism [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 321-336]

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BORIS PATERNU
Thus it is no accident that of everything new and liberating, Nietzsche
made the strongest impression on this young poet from the narrow-minded
province. Zupancic was especially attracted by Nietzsche's joyful neopaganism and his gospel of the free soul which rejects the "counterfeit
light and stifling air" of subordination, as Zarathustra taught it, and prefers
its own will, power and goals.7 But Zupancic soon subjected Nietzsche
to correction, using Tolstoy as a moral imperative. This was nothing unusual,
because for the first wave of Slovene Modernists, Russian literature usually
functioned to stabilize their sensitive moral and social consciousness and
to be a sort of antidote to decadent amorality.8
The next correction to Nietzsche resulted from Zupancic's encounter
with Bergson's spiritualist and pantheist vitalism, which well matched
his own leanings toward spiritualism and inutition. Also significant was
Zupancic's encounter with Bergson's philosophy of language, which had
already taken semiotic dynamism into account and had even gone beyond
the positivist conception that the connection of words to things and signs
to meaning is appropriate and natural. Bergson had discovered the essence
of language in the "mobilite des mots," in their liberation from objects,
in their subjectively determined semantic mobility.9 With Zupancic, we
also encounter the vision of a poet who, like Adam, in soverign manner
rejuvenates the things of the world, baptizing them with words and lifting
them out of their namelessness; 1 and this shortly before Mandelstam
formulated his thesis on the sovereignty of the poetic word-which is not
the slave of things, he said, but is subject to the psyche, which inhabits
and links to objects meanings of any shape it arbitrarily chooses.11
But Zupancic's rectification of Bergson's philosophy and of symbolist
language remained relatively restrained. We can even trace a gradual qualification of Symbolism and of the newly emergent Expressionism. The main
reason for this lay in the poet's even closer connection to the fundamental
political and social issues which his country had to face during this dramatic
episode of its history. With the end of the First World War and the collapse
of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Slovenia was divided among four nations
and only two-thirds of her people were included in the new mother nation
of Yugoslavia. During the Second World War, in accordance with the new
concept of Europe, they were consigned to total national liquidation.
This resulted in armed resistance and revolution, which were part of the
common Yugoslav struggle for freedom from 1941 to 1945. Zupancic's
poetry, despite its personal and cosmopolitan tone, was increasingly coupled
to historical events from the turn of the century onwards, but especially
so after the volume of poems, Samogovori (1908). In the first decade of
the new century he had already turned to the other type of modem poetry;
the poets of social and civil progress, Walt Whitman and E. Vearhaeren,
emerged into the foreground of Zupancic's interest (Duma, 1908).
From there he increasingly pursued contemporary problems until, in 1941,