The article deals with the fantastic in the work of Vladimir Bartol. In his early years, Bartol highly valued the fantastic as an artistic element and discussed this with Vidmar, who saw Bartol’s prose as the fantastic. This term has also been used by some literary critics and historians to describe Bartol’s work, most recently by Franc Zadravec in relation to the novel Alamut. The discussion first examines all these designations and concludes that they are not compatible with each other. An attempt is therefore first made to find a useful definition of the fantastic. The lowest common denominator is that it is a genre or mode of writing 141Tomo Virk, Vladimir Bartol, fantastika ter slovenska literarna zgodovina in kritikain which two realities are interwoven: the natural or conventional everyday reality and one that goes beyond “normal” reality and enters the realm of the supernatural and inexplicable. This distinguishes the fantastic from mere imagination or “fantasy”, which in Slovenian is another term for creative imagination. The discussion shows that Bartol and Vidmar, at least after World War II, adequately understood the fantastic and its relationship to imagination (“fantasy”), but that judgements about the fantastic in Bartol’s work are somewhat exaggerated. There are only a few places in Bartol’s entire oeuvre where the author approaches the fantastic, especially in the novella Don Lorenzo. In most of the short stories and in both novels, there is no sign of the fantastic. The discussion therefore focuses in more detail on Zadravec’s analysis of Alamut as a supposedly “the fantastic novel”. It concludes that in the case of Alamut, Zadravec does not treat the fantastic at the same level as in other Slovene novels, labelled as the fantastic in his analysis, nor in accordance with the generally recognised definition of the fantastic. The conclusion of the discussion is that there is hardly a trace of the fantastic in Bartol’s work and that the references made by literary critics and historians are aimed more at “fantasy” in broader sense of the word, at unbridled artistic imagination, which was not particularly appreciated in the period of social realism when Bartol was writing.
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