The author discusses the relationship between realism and other novelistic aesthetics in Mira Mihelič's first novel Obraz v zrcalu (1941). In first two parts of the novel Mihelič introduces the pattern of the realistic novel about urban marriage and adultery that developed during European Realism and Naturalism and had not previously existed in Slovene literature. Particularly recognizable thematic influences are those of Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, Maupassant's Her Life and Tolstoy's Ana Karenina. The strongest influence - not only thematic, but also stylistic - had been Flaubert's Madame Bovary. With respect to the conception of novelistic narrative the novel entirely fits into the tradition of the realistic novel, particularly with the technique of personal narrator and with a "Balzacian" incipit. The last three parts of the novel can be considered a pursuit of more personal literary path, as the author "fumbles" for various options that the novelistic genre has to offer, from moralistic, sentimental to the women's novel of the 1930's.
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