The paper deals with a phenomenon that has been little discussed before: it seems that between the two World Wars the short story was often shaped by certain Slovenian authors (e.g. Slavko Grum, Ludvik Mrzel, France Bevk, Marija Kmetova, Milen Mohorič) like a fictional diary or a fictional letter. Actual diaries, e.g. those by Tolstoy or Strindberg, were very popular at the time and readers understood them as the ultimate mode of authetic reporting, as an example of real life, something not made up. The diary short stories, having a much smaller scale than the diaries proper and therefore sometimes calling themselves 'a leaf from a diary', tried to capture this very atmosphere of authenticity and by so doing they eventually reached a paradox: they employed special and elaborate literary strategies to look as unliterary, as close to a real document of life as possible.
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