The discussion of Slovene modernistic realizations of the novel cannot avoid its narrative form and claims about the origins of the Slovene novel by Dušan Pirjevec. His reading of Jurčič’s Deseti brat pointed out aesthetic shortcomings of the earliest narrative prose and discovered some motives for turning literature into ideology. The novel as a form has its specific conventions and clearly represents the existence of some minimum of historical circumstances that render it possible. The question why the Slovene novel only reached considerable aesthetic quality with certain narrative texts that may be considered modernistic, poses therefore a much greater challenge. Based on Bakhtin’s and Pirjevec’s findings, the paper will tackle the problem of the existence of the minimum of historical circumstances that was a prerequisite for the artistically relevant novel among Slovenes, which is also comparable in the European context.
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