THE OLD MAN AND SLOVENIA: HEMINGWA Y STUDIES IN THE SLOVENIAN CULTURAL CONTEXT

The name of Ernest Hemingway was first mentioned in Slovenian literary criticism by the writer and critic Tone Seliskar1 in 1933. Soon afterwards, Grisa Koritnik, the foremost translator of English and American literatures in the period between the two wars, in his article »The Great War in the English Novel<<2 described the protagonist of the novel A Farewell to Arms I 1929) somewhat enigmatically as >>the symbol of the old generation«. In a short survey of contemporary American literature, which Anton Debeljak in 1939 freely adapted from the article previously published by J. Wood Krutch in The Times,3 Hemingway was grouped together with the Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck and novelist Erskine Caldwell, which is to say with the giants of the then mainstream American fiction. However, it is curious that a Slovenian reader should already from this article have learned how Hemingway, the author of >>powerful stories«, had recently become monotonous, which was before he even had a fair chance to get acquainted with any of his works translated into Slovenian. After World War Two Slovenians got an insight into the existence of the >>Lost Generation« first from the Russian perspective, namely from the Russian critic A. Starcev's study >>On a Social Novel in the United States of America«4, translated by the poet Mile KlopCic. John Dos Passos and Ernest the Social Novel in the United States of America«), Novi svet, 1947, pp. 130-137. Hemingway were the only writers of this generation to be explicitly named in the article, whose literary work the author considered as >>Worthy of every respect« and classifying them as »critical realists«. Starcev's outlook is all the more important, for he was one of the few who did not label at least this part of American literature as ·>>the decadent literature of the Imperialist reaction«, unlike several other Cold War Russian critics.5 The


The Echoes of Ern est H emingway in Slovenia
The name of Ernest Hemingway was first mentioned in Slovenian literary criticism by the writer and critic Tone Seliskar 1 in 1933.Soon afterwards, Grisa Koritnik, the foremost translator of English and American literatures in the period between the two wars, in his article »The Great War in the English Novel<< 2 described the protagonist of the novel A Farewell to Arms I 1929) somewhat enigmatically as >>the symbol of the old generation«.In a short survey of contemporary American literature, which Anton Debeljak in 1939 freely adapted from the article previously published by J. Wood Krutch in The Times, 3 Hemingway was grouped together with the Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck and novelist Erskine Caldwell, which is to say with the giants of the then mainstream American fiction.However, it is curious that a Slovenian reader should already from this article have learned how Hemingway, the author of >>powerful stories«, had recently become monotonous, which was before he even had a fair chance to get acquainted with any of his works translated into Slovenian.
After World War Two Slovenians got an insight into the existence of the >>Lost Generation« first from the Russian perspective, namely from the Russian critic A. Starcev's study >>On a Social Novel in the United States of America« 4 , translated by the poet Mile KlopCic.John Dos Passos and Ernest the Social Novel in the United States of America«), Novi svet, 1947, pp.130-137.Hemingway were the only writers of this generation to be explicitly named in the article, whose literary work the author considered as >>Worthy of every respect« and classifying them as »critical realists«.Starcev's outlook is all the more important, for he was one of the few who did not label at least this part of American literature as •>>the decadent literature of the Imperialist reaction«, unlike several other Cold War Russian critics. 5The 1 Tone Seliskar, »Pisatelji na indeksu« (>>Writers on the Index«), Ljubljanski zvon LIII, 1933, 7/8, p. 512.' GriSa Koritnik, >>Svetovna vojna v angleskem romanw< (>>The Great War in the English Novel«), :Zivljenje in svet, 1936, 20, p.157.
Lost Generation that in the 1920s emerged as literarily victorious was still active after the Second World War and in fact reemerged in the centre of interest.It was only then that the Slovenians began to get to know it, through translated literary texts.
The novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) had a fairly strong impact in Slovenia just after the Second World War.Several articles praised the novel and the film version highly in 1948. 6It should be noted that already then, and continuing on into the fifties and sixties, much news on Hemingway's latest works and life were brought to the readers' attention in Primorski dnevnik, the paper of the Littoral and the Primorska region, which due to its geographic position relied greatly on the Italian press.Thus Slovenian readers learned about Hemingway in many instances via Italian literary Clitics, where he was, for obvious reasons, very popular.
In 1950 the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls made a memorable literary entry in the translation of Janez Gradisnik,7 who for the first time did not try at all costs to adapt and change the characteristic lexical and syntactic aspects of the English original, which had been the set custom of literary translators up to then.He consistently followed the stylistic and compositional characteristics of Hemingway's »terse<< fiction, thereby introducing into Slovenian a fresh new literary practice.Moreover, the translations (or merely extracts) of many of Hemingway's works, novels and short stories, were at the time extremely popular with the reading public (The Green Hills of Africa, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Old Man and the Sea, etcY Likewise, the author's private life and travels were followed with great interest: his travels to Kenya, Spain, and the like. 9he representatives of the Lost Generation seem to have enhanced the Slovenian interest for American literature in abstracto. 10 formally less demanding, »easy« works of the »Found Generation« (cf.»la generation bien trouvee<< 11 ), and only then the literary critics and Slovenian authors learned about the more experimentally oriented writings of the Lost Generation.They were specifically attracted by its compositional procedures (the study of Dusan Pirjevec on The Old Man and the Sea is treated in this article in detail) . 12hether or not we accept it, the contacts with modern American fiction undoubtedly left visible, although so far not yet properly evaluated influences on Slovenian literature.This is particularly true of the novelists who began to publish their works in the decade before the war and immediately after it. 13) There are traces of Hemingway's stylistic touches, some of which are very significant for Slovenian fictional development.Thus the short story »Sonce vzhaja in zahaja« (»The Sun Also Rises«, 1953) by Mimi Malensek significantly bears the same title as Hemingway's novel from 1926.Malensek's story was published in Slovenian translation later, although it had been mentioned before in literary criticism, where the author must have learned about it.There are strong resemblances between Hemingway's work The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and the novel Balada o trobenti in oblaku (The Ballad about the Trumpet and the Cloud, 1956) written by Ciril Kosmac, especially as far as motives and composition are concerned.The literary critic Janko Kos maintains it is in fact the Slovenian parallel to Hemingway's novelJS The most significant American impetus for Slovenian fiction writing was therefore in the more subjectivized and more carefully structured narration in post-war, which had been, so far, simple, mutatis mutandis, if not documentary.Thus we witness the emergence of the more compressed literary forms: sketches, novellas, short stories and novels.In turn, Slovenian fiction writers of the fifties and sixties, under the influence of the Lost Generation, began to use also the inner monologue of the protagonists, in view of a new, subjective time perspective of the novels.Ernest Hemingway's presence in Slovenian press continued to be strong in the late fifties and sixties, including his nomination for the Nobel Prize, 16 his supposed visit to Yugoslavia in 1959,17 and his sudden (mysterious) death " Cf.Marc Saporta, Histoi1'e du ron~an americain (The History of the American Novel), Paris, 1970.
in 19611 8 which was compared to that of Louis Adamic.1 9 In 1965 the Slovenian reporter Bogdan Pogacnik visited Cuba and the Hemingway estate Finca Vigia, where he was surprised to find that the housekeeper was Ana Stare, a Slovenian from Trieste, who had been a maid with the Hemingway for sixteen years.She was very complimentary about the writer: »Oh, Mr. Hemingway was a good man.We were not considered his servants and maids, but he was more like a father to us«. 20Ana Stare left her home town Trieste in 1930 for Argentina.In 1947 she came to Cuba, where she answered an ad to get the job of a maid with the Hemingways.Eventually she became their close friend, together with Rene Villareal, the housekeeper.
Finally, Hemingway's play The Fifth Column was staged in Ljubljana in 1970 and was not a great success.It was seen by the critics solely as an episode from the Spanish Civil War.2 1 Several of Hemingway's novels have since been re/printed in Slovenia (the list of translations of his major works is to be found in the Notes),22 including the translation of his last novel Islands in the Stream in 1973 23 and a few recent mentionings of The Garden of Eden, the novel published after his death and in Slovenian translation in 1989.

Some Specific Slovenian Critical Perspectives of Hemingway's Art
The Old Man and the Sea brought Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in 1952, and was instrumental in winning him the Nobel Prize two years later.It goes without saying that, as in other European countries, this short novel also had a great impact in Slovenia.If we leave aside the intricate and abundant Anglo-American criticism that attempted to analyse this undoubtedly arresting work,2 4 it seems most appropriate to mention in this respect the Slovenian study »About the Idea and the Composition of the Novel The Old Man and the Sea« by Dusan Pirjevec, 25 which, in our view, opened up a whole new dimension in understanding this work.Pirjevec (1921-1977)  was primarily a comparativist, particularly interested in the structural poetics that most certainly influenced the discussed study of Hemingway's novel, since in it he is essentially concerned with the structure and the underlying philosophical dimensions per se.
Despite the fact that the framework of the discussed novel appears rather simple, the proportional distribution of individual parts should not pass unnoticed.Pirjevec contends that there are two stories which are intertwined in the novel, the one about the hunt and, on the other hand, the depiction of Santiago's innermost thoughts, feelings and his final recognition, comparable to the ancient Greek notion of the »anagnorisis« of the main protagonist.Consequently, the novel seems to have the structure of the classical tragedy.Hemingway according to him used the principles of symmetry and contrast in order to be able to elaborate his views about the laws of human destiny, the Greek »moira«.Just like Oedipus, Santiago also transgressed against some >>higher order of things«; because of the inborn • human blindness and ignorance about his position in the universe, he was guilty of »the tragic error« that Aristotle called »hamartia«.Pirjevec goes on to say that »the question of Man's existence generally lies in the core of this novel.He is not interested in the destiny of each individual embedded in society, which is why his novel remains without the actual social or political point ... The clash, therefore, is not limited only to the level of individual and society; rather, it occurs between Man and Life in their cosmic dimensions«.26 The two parallel stories Pirjevec hypothetically divided into five parts: I. Ashore before the Hunt, II.The Old Man in Search of the Fish, Ill.Santiago wrestles with the Fish, IV.The Fisherman returns to the Shore, V.
Ashore after the HuntY The third part is the central one and the longest: it comprises approximately twenty-five pages.It is surprising that the first two are of similar length (the page ratios of the individual parts are 9:6:25: 12:3).It is not gratuitous that the beginning of the novel is of about the same length as the last part, whereby the writer in Pirjevec's view achieved a symmetrical distribution of the compiled material.
If we wanted to show graphically the line of the old man's thoughts and feelings, we would get the form of an isosceles triangle, where the two sides represent a thesis and an antithesis: the rise of the fisherman's self-confidence, and the eventual decline of his inner stregth to his final hideaway in the dreams about the lions.The story about the hunt itself is quite different, though.The denouement is much longer, for the climax, when Santiago hits the fish with his harpoon, occurs much later.Despite the apparent double compositional line of the novel, one should not think of it as lacking the necessary internal balance, because the two line developments are closely interrelated throughout the text.The lines of the old man's thoughts and of real events are constantly competing, each trying to get ahead of the other, which creates the tension and jerking fictional impulses.Thus, in our view the novel's action line is perhaps a »leaping and lingering« one, rising in a balladesque atmosphere up an imaginary staircase.All the qualities which Pirjevec pointed out undoubtedly revealed additional artistic merits of The Old Man and the Sea to the Slovenian reading public.
On the other hand, the comparativist Janko Kos in 1964 wrote in the foreword to the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls an a priori uncomplimentary appreciation of Hemingway's art, stemming particularly from the criterion of the gap between the uncommitted writer and society. 28Kos accused Hemingway's fiction of »escapism«, not morely in its motives, but also in the impasse of its ideas and view of life.Kos especially referred to his »gross« eroticism, as well as to his atheism.Also, Hemingway's frequently praised individualism is, for Kos, just a kind of cheap adventurism, which simply is, regardless of any social dimensions.
Professor Mirko Jurak in 1975 wrote an afterward about Hemingway's art, published in a joint edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, in which he reinstated the value of Hemingway's art in Slovenia. 29He counted him among those American writers of the first half of the twentieth century who managed to go beyond the one-sided, pragmatic or deterministic view of the world.Jurak emphatically dismissed the reproaches about the supposed Hemingway's antiintellectualism, for they were based on the hypothesis that he cherished a naturalistic literary expression and by extension adhered to its philosophy, which is why he remained on the surface reality in the depiction of Man's existence.
According to Jurak the reader has no particular difficulty in finding out that, in Hemingway's best novels, the protagonists always transcend the surface fabulae and wrestle also with the ultimate I cosmic issues of human being or non-being.The writer achieved this dimension through the use of symbolism and metaphorical language, which are both organically and inextricably linked to the development of the action. 30The Old Man and the Sea therefore depicts the idea that the essential meaning of life still dwells mysterious for Man, showing his impotence to penetrate this focal enigma, despite his continuous efforts to do so.According to Jurak, one cannot but love and cherish one's own life, one's position in the world and the universe, 28 Ernest Hemingway, Komu zvoni (For Whom the Bell Tolls), translated by J. Gradisnik, the introductory study by Janko Kos.Ljubljana: CZ, 1964, pp.5-30. 29Ernest Hemingway, Komu zvoni, Starec in morje (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea), translated by J. Gradisnik, the afterward by Mirko Jurak.Ljubljana: CZ, 1975, pp.593-611. 30Ibid., 594.
by struggling with them and not running away, despite occasional defeats, for, like Emily Dickinson observed, »'Twere blessed to have seen -«,31 but those to have tried to penetrate the elemental mystery of life were few indeed, if not unsuccessful altogether.

H emingway on the Banks of the Soca River
The novel A Fare<.1•ell to Arms is of special importance for the Slovenians, since its events take place on Slovenian ground by the Soca river (the Italian name was Isonzo), on the so-called »Isonzo front« during the Great War in which Hemingway personally participated. 32According to some sources he saw the terrible defeat of the Italian army at Kobarid (Italian Caporetto) and its erratic retreat via Gorica (Gorizia) to the river Piave front, 33 where he was himself seriously wounded.He later recovered in a military hospital at Milan.
The fact that the novel deals with an event that happened on Slovenian ground, which was at the time divided between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian empire, was so significant for Slovenian critics that one of them even expressed his disapproval with Hemingway's novel, because »he could have known the Soca front better, he should have been aware of the fact that the local population spoke Slovenian to him, and not some strange sort of Italian dialect<<.3 4 Indeed, according to the critic Rado Bordon, the young Hemingway did not know he was fighting on Slovenian ground, for he thought he was among the Italians on their ground. 35n one passage from the novel, Hemingway describes two refugee girls that Frederic Henry and his driver Aymo Barto picked up in Gorizia during their retreat.They speak »a dialect« that neither Aymo, who is Italian, nor Frederic, who is fluent in Italian, can understand.Although the writer never explicitly names the place and the river it seems very likely that the subtle and lifelike descriptions refer to the Soca river and Kobarid, in Italian Caporetto: »I remember it as a little white town with a campanile in a valley.It was a clean little town and there was a fine fountain in the square«. 30lthough Hemingway does not mention the Slovenians, one must bear in mind that the Slovenian language was not recognized as official in Italy before the Great War, and what is more, there were strong (but unsuccessful) tendencies to italianize the Slovenian population of the Primorska region, tendencies which continued until the Second World War.
It is interesting to read the study of Bruce Mclver (Acta Neophilologica, XXI, 1988, edited by Professor Janez Stanonik), who maintains that Hemingway did not take part in the retreat from Kobarid at all, since at the time of retreat (in October 1917) he was still a reporter on the Kansas City Star.
Mclver is right for Hemingway did not arrive to the Italian front until the mid-June of 1918. 37It is obvious that Hemingway used the Kobarid debacle as a fictionalized event without himself having actually participated in it.However, it does not necessarily follow that he never visited the scene of the retreat, the Soca, Kobarid, Plave, not even Gorizia, nor that he met two Slovenian girls at the time of the retreat.We do know that he visited the Italian town Fossalta di Piave, where he also had been stationed during the war, to show his wife Hadley where he had been wounded. 38Mclver writes that the girls Hemingway met were probably the refugees who were in large numbers swept during the retreat of the Italian army from Kobarid out of the Soca valley onto the plains of Northern Italy (to the river Piave), which is possible, for the front villages suffered many fierce battles.He therefore concludes that the descriptions of the fights and the landscape are the result of Hemingway's detailed research of battle accounts and relative topographic maps.3 9 Mclver's constatations, although partially valid, perhaps still warrant further research.
A piece of evidence is also an interview with a well-known Croatian poet Gustav Krklec. 40Krklec in 1971 told reporter Herman Vogel that Hemingway was his friend during the »roaring twenties«, namely his Paris years: >>In the autumn of 1927 there was the funeral of the famous American dancer Isidora Duncan.I came to Paris for a month and met a few writers, among them Ernest Hemingway, who was the correspondent for some American papers there.He was not yet famous then, but nevertheless highly esteemed in the Paris literary circles.The Serbian poet Rade Drainac introduced me to Hemingway one evening in the Cafe Rotunda. 4 1 Krklec furthermore described Hemingway's fascination for the black dancer Josephine Baker who had a bar on Place Pigalle, the meeting already described in a book by Hemingway's friend Hotschner. 42Krklec remembered one night when they met an old man playing a violin in the street.Hemingway threw a thousand francs into his empty hat, which was a great deal of money then.On some other occasion he met a poor Polish emigre poet and gave him his whole vallet: »I had not seen Hemingway since, but he sent me two postcards from Madrid during the Civil War.On the first one, John Dos Passos and general Ludwig Rom were also signed.Some Americans offered me five hundred dollars for them.Hemingway also sent me a tie with red stripes that the republicans demonstratively wore in Spain at the time. 43ustav Krklec visited the town Bovec and the Soca river in the summer of 1970, where he allegedly met a retired colonel, Hemingway's friend from the war, and decided to write a scenario for a television series about Hemingway on the Soca.He visited the pub »Pri mrzlem studentcu« (»At the " Charles A.  Cold Spring«) in Kobarid and the innkeeper told him that Hemingway had had twelve rums in a row there one night during the Great War.According to Krklec, Hemingway used his military experience from the Soca river in two of his novels: A Farewell to Arms and Across the River and Into the Trees (especially as far as descriptions are concerned).
It seems that Hemingway admired the Soca river from the BanjsCice (Bainsizza) plateau, where many fights had taken place (also Carlos Baker writes that his descriptions are those of this plateau).Krklec even mentioned someone from Bovec who showed him the very house where Hemingway had been (?) stationed with ambulance vans. 44For the purpose of a good scenario Krklec plunged into the study of Hemingway's life in Italy during the war.He visited Hemingway's friend Jacob Altmayer, a German who fought with him in Spain: »Altmayer told me that Hemingway often remembered the Soca river and always wanted to revisit Kobarid, Tolmin and Banjscice.Altmayer was a volunteer in the American army during World War Two, and after the war a member of the German parliament.I was his guest in Bonn where we talked about Hemingway, nights in, nights out<<. 45However, Gustav Krklec for unknown reasons never finished his project and the whole truth about Hemingway's presence on the Soca front during the Great War still remains to be disclosed.
As to the not fully established truth about the fictionalised/imaginary experience of the young Ernest Hemingway in the very battles of the front on the Soca (lsonzo), it is of great interest for our research to review the most recent biographical books on the life and times of the young Hemingway: Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: a Biography (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1985); Michael Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986); Michael Reynolds, Hemingway's First War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1987).
M. Reynolds in The Young Henzingway brings to light a new fact.According to him Hemingway found a rich source of data about the events on the Soca front, which he later included in his A Farewell to Arms, in an Italian whom he met at the Milan hospital, where he had been transported after a severe wound on the front, when an ambulance was blown apart by an Austrian shell.Nick Nerone told him some wonderful and real war stories which supplemented Hemingway's reading about the history of the Great War, including the Italian disaster at Caporetto (Kobarid). 46Reynolds says about Nerone: »When the Italian army moved up toward the Bainsizza plateau, Nerone was there at Plava (Plave, my note) and Mount Kuk.And he was there in the mountains on the morning of October 1917, when the Austro-Hungarian forces broke the Italian front at Caporetto.<< 47It is more than certain that listening to Nerone's authentic war stories Hemingway learned many details which he combined eventually in the novel with his own experience as an ambulance driver at the front at the Italian town of Schio.The author of the book maintains that he never forgot Nerone's stories of Gorizia, the Isonzo and Caporetto.Having read numerous war histories and military maps Hemingway seems to have changed Nerone's 44 Ibidem. 45Ibidem. 46Michael Reynolds, The Young Hemingway.Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. character into that of Frederic Henry, an ambulance driver with the Italian army, who was at the front from the very beginning.
Reynolds's most recent book on Hemingway's participation in the First World War Hemingway's First War gives the so far most detailed description of the making of A Farewell to Arms.We first learn that in April 1918 Ernest Hemingway finally left his job on the local paper Kansas City Star and departed in search of his own war experience in Northern Italy. 48According to the sources, American Red Cross Ambulance to which Hemingway was assigned was stationed at Schio in the Dolomites, where there was little action.In July 1918 he was at his request transferred to Fossalta di Piave, where his van was blown up by the Austrians. 49Wounded, he was sent to Milan, where he met the already mentioned Italian soldier Nick Nerone, who after the war migrated to the United States.Reynolds is, despite Hemingway's own contentions, persuaded that the writer had not seen the Tagliamento river when he wrote A Farewell to Arms, and that it was not until 1948 that he saw Udine: »He may never have seen Gorizia, the Isonzo river, Plava, or the Bainsizza plateau; he certainly had not seen them when he wrote the novel ... His 1927 trip to Italy with Guy Hickok did not cover the war zone of 1915-1917.Not only had Hemingway not experienced the military engagements in which Frederic Henry takes part, but he had not seen the terrain of Books One and Three of A Farewell to Arms.« 50 Indeed, Hemingway's description of the Caporetto retreat with detailed military reports is masterly and true to life, although he may not have served on the Italian front.Italian critics, some of whom took part in the described battle at Kobarid, did not find fault with Hemingway' depiction of history and geography in the novel.It is interesting to note that the Italian fascist government considered the defeat at Kobarid such a traumatic experience that A Farewell to Arms was banned in Italy until the end of the Second World War. 51In 1954 Alberto Rossi reminded the Italian readers that Hemingway might have indeed taken part in the retreat of the Italian army from Caporetto, especially because of the extreme accuracy of his descriptions: »That the work was in effect one of imagination and not of history, however evident this seems, was not an affirmation which could satisfy everyone's curiosity.« 52n 1948 Ernest Hemingway wrote his own introduction for an illustrated edition of A Farewell to Anns, where he made no pretense of having experienced the historical events described in the novel firsthand: >>I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day.Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been ... Finding you were able to make something up; ... « 53 Michael Reynolds therefore maintains that Hemingway masterly recreated the war experience from books, maps and firsthand sources.In his view, aided by military histories, he recreated the Austro-Italian front of 1915-1917 more vividly than any other writer, 54 and to read A Farewell to Arms as his biography is to misread the book.Reynolds however concludes his introduction to >>The Making of A Farewell to Arms« with the view of F. S. Fitzgerald, who assumed that Hemingway was in Italy in 1917 and that the experience of the book is largely autobiographical.Hemingway himself did not correct Fitzgerald's assumption, neither did he encourage anyone to read the novel as autobiography.In this particular case it is clearly difficult to establish the degree of fictional rality and >>Objective« reality described in the novel, since we examined proofs which confirm either hypotheses: Hemingway's participation in the Caporetto retreat and his non-participation in this debacle.
>>In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.«In this first sentence of A Farewell to Arms critics have often in vain attempted to establish the answer to the questions of >>in which village?<<, >>looking across what river to which mountains?<<.For a literary critic it is interesting to discover just how accurate the geography of the I sonzo (Soea) front and chronologgy were for a period of the Great War and a part of the country that Hemingway might or might not have seen.According to Reynolds Hemingway described all the battles of the Isonzo with extreme historical precision. 55As to the >>village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains<< we could say that there were only two villages that looked across the Soca river toward the mountains: Gradisca (Slovene-Gradiska) and Lucinico, both of them only a few miles west of Gorizia (Gorica).Particularly the view from Gradiska across the river Soca was in 1915 recorded by an Italian-born American journalist Gino Speranza, which is indeed very similar to the description of Hemingway's protagonist Frederic Henry at the same time and at the same place: >>In front lay the Isonzo, with fields running down to its banks, across it, a low livid red mountain, the Carso (Kras, my note), and farther away to the left (north), under the protection of the Austrian mountains, Gorizia!<< 56 Just as the rest of the extant literary criticism on Hemingway, this study does not attempt to say the final word in the discussion of Ernest Hemingway's participation in the fictionalized battles of the Caporetto retreat.We have pointed to the facts in favour of both possibilities.Hemingway himself wanted the readers and the critics to believe that he used in the novel A Farewell to Arms his real war experience, which was probably inkeeping with his wish to lend all the possible verisimilitude to the described events.The mentioned documents by some Slovenian authors confirm his presence at Kobarid with the Italian troops, while certain American critics assert that Hemingway could by no means have been at Koba The present consideration of »Hemingway studies« in Slovenian cultural context has followed three distinct lines of research development: the echoes of Ernest Hemingway in Slovenia, some specific Slovenian critical perspectives of Hemingway's art, and finally Hemingway on the banks of the Soca river.The three discussed thematic clusters, all of which have largely attempted to deal with the impact/reception of his works on Slovenian ground, show through their complex interrelatedness that Hemingway has been a very popular novelist among the Slovenians, who has again and again forced translators to render his works into Slovenian and encouraged literary critics to analyse his oeuvre in some detail, while the response of the readers depended on contemporary social events (e. g.World War Two) and political circumstances (the period between the two wars).
The first part discovers the fact that Slovenian readers learned about Hemingway already in 1933, while they first got a better insight into the existence of the writers of the »Lost Generation<< in 1947 in an article by the Russian critic Starcev, who with ideological limitations of his mind labelled it »the decadent literature of the Imperialist reaction<<.Hemingway's novels only became properly evaluated and more widely read in the sixties, when they also influenced a number of Slovenian writers.The second part of the article discusses Dusan Pirjevec's study of The Old Man and the Sea, who from the viewpoint of structural poetics compared the structure of the novel with that of the classical Greek tragedy, for it also meets all Aristotle's requirements for a tragedy.It furthermore presents the views of Janko Kos, who accused Hemingway's fiction of »escapism<< and labelled his so often praised individualism as »Cheap adventurism<<, and Mirko Jurak, who reinstated the value of Hemingway's art in Slovenia, particularly because he stressed the need for Man to grapple with his destiny and not run away, despite occasional defeats or fear.
• The final thematic cluster tries to shed new light on the fact whether Hemingway did actually participate in the battle of Caporetto (Kobarid) on the banks of the Isonzo (Soca) river during the Great War, which he so vividly described in his novel A Farewell to Arms.The extant biographical data and several ne•w sources were considered, all of which point to the fact that both the fictionalized or real experience of the young Hemingway on the Isonzo front are possible, although we established that Hemingway decidedly wanted the readers of his novel to think that he had used in the novel his real war experience.Having examined the relevant documents, it is no exaggeration to say that he was at least present on the Isonzo front for a certain period of time, although he may not have actually participated in the defeat of the Italian army at Caporetto (Kobarid).