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Abstract
In 1865 short poem “Obraz VII” (Picture VII) published by the Slovenian post-romantic poet Simon Jenko (1835–1869), paradigmatic figures of speech (exclamation, apostrophe, and rhetorical question) subvert the presence of the speaking persona and the subjectively modalized landscape (Stimmungslandschaft) that were characteristic of the obraz genre. Rhetoricity of the lyrical voice may be seen as the trace of the underlying traditional intertext of ruins stemming from the early modern topos, in which the image of demolished buildings is linked to the notion of vanitas vanitatum, i.e., to the idea of the elusiveness of being, society, and culture. Jenko’s short poem is a variation within the vast and intermedial imaginary of ruins that has been central to the fashioning of European cultural identity (viewed as the presence of the past under permanent de- and reconstruction), especially since the eighteenth century. Compared to other variations of the ruin motif in romanticism (e.g., Byron, Uhland, Lenau, Mickiewicz, Petőfi), Jenko’s ascetic, fragmented poem re-writes the topos differently, through semantic undecidability that comes close to the post-modern existential condition.
France Prešeren made the sonnet fashionable in Slovenian literature as a representative poetic form and at the same time he revived it as a storehouse of cultural functions the influence of which could be felt up to postmodernism. Prešeren armed with the aesthetic postulate of the Schlegel brothers considered the sonnet a poetical form capable of cultivating the Slovenian poetical language and in this way raising it to the canons of clas-sical and modern literature. In the time of Romanticism poetics belonged to the fundamental values and therefore became an integral part in discussions concerning the questions of poetic creation. Prešeren wrote a lot of poems whose main topic is self-reflexion, eg. his sonnets with the most important one in them: The Wreath of Sonnets. Prešeren in these sonnets grouped the contexts, goals, structures and situations pointing out their critical reception, highlighting his own modern Petrarcism. He gave reasons for his choice of style, topic and language, showed the difference between pragmatic and poetic manifestation, revealed the common roots of his personal life and his poems (making a clearcut difference between the biographical and poetical ego) mythicized his own poetic and national mission. Finally we outline the developing stages of Prešeren's autoreflexive sonnets connected with him in an intertextual way in the time of modernism and postmodernism.
