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.The former bonds11 that held the Yugoslav peoples together have weakened considerably:Slovenes tend now to know much more about Italian and Austrian poli-tics and literature (not to mention American pop culture) than about trendsin Serbia or even next-door Croatia.This trend is even affecting mutualperceptions in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia Hercegovina, the languages ofwhich have often been considered variants of a common tongue.Since1991 there has been a politically driven separation of the three histori-cally attested variants.The attempts to standardize them once and for allinto Serbian, Croatian, and Bosniak, which have encountered political anddialectal obstacles in all three cases, have indeed redirected the younger11 generations attention inward, to the culture of the new nation-states.Ina similar fashion, elsewhere in Central Europe many young Czechs viewSlovaks not as  cousins with whom they share many historical common-alities and linguistic similarities, but as total strangers.There is not muchnostalgia, of course, for the days of communist rule, but the recent artisticand cultural exhibitions and museums on themes from the communistdecades in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary are reminders thatthe past neither can, nor should, be completely forgotten.Meanwhile, inSlovenia, many streets still bear the names of communist-era leaders,though an increasing number have been changed.Debates over renaming11 are often lively and reflect both political and religious allegiances andcitizens perspectives on the post-World War II history of the country.Slovene life expectancy has risen steadily since 1991.It now stands at80 years for women and 72 for men.Not all postcommunist countrieshave met with such success; in Russia, for example, a deterioration of11 social services and an increase in alcoholism has led recently to a steepIndependent Slovenia: politics, culture, and society 13111 drop in life expectancy.But Slovenes continue to be concerned about theirsuicide rate, which is the sixth highest in the world.Investigators aroundthe world concerned with high incidences of suicide in countries likeSlovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Hungary, are pursuing possiblecausal connections to alcoholism, genetic structure, literacy rates, andeconomic conditions.Culture11 Intellectual life and the arts continue to overlap with politics in Sloveniato a considerable degree.This has often been the case in the past, althoughthe influence of culture on long-term issues of national identity is prob-11 ably even greater.Some of the leading authors in Slovenia as the twentiethcentury drew to a close were Berta Bojetu, Andrej Blatnik, Mate Dolenc,Evald Flisar, Brane Gradia
nik, Drago Jan%0Å„ar, Milan Jesih, Kajetan Kovi%0Å„,Nedeljka Pirjevec, and Rudi `
eligo.Dolenc, whose works often deal withmaritime themes, has been a prolific writer since the 1960s.Jesih won the2002 Prea
eren Prize, Slovenia s highest literary award, for his poetry andplays.Andrej Blatnik, a much-heralded short story writer, has even had111 a collection of his stories brought out in English, Skinswaps.Maja Novakand Feri Laina
%0Å„ek are other young prose writers attracting considerableattention.More and more works by Edvard Kocbek continue to appearin English translation, but Drago Jan%0Å„ar remains the most internationallyrecognized of Slovene writers.As discussed in the previous chapter, hisnovels and short stories, mostly on rather weighty intellectual and histor-ical themes, are starting to appear in English, and even more have appearedin German.Jan%0Å„ar defends Slovenia s secession while encouraging bothcontinued cultural contact with the Balkans and a coming to terms withpolitical crimes of the past.111 Slovenia boasts a large number of well-known poets, many of whoseworks are available in English translation; they include Alea
Debeljak, NikoÇGrafenauer, Alojz Ihan, Boris Novak, Toma~
Salamun, Veno Taufer, andDane Zajc.Some of them, such as `
alamun and Taufer, are decidedlyavant-garde, while Debeljak s oeuvre is complemented by an intriguingset of memoirs entitled Twilight of the Idols.Novak is also famous for hishuman rights activism: during the early 1990s he spearheaded the effortof the Slovene PEN Center and the Writers for Peace Committee to assista large number of writers and their families in war-torn Bosnia.Grafenauerwas the prominent editor of the famous journal Nova Revija which galva-111 nized Slovene and, later, international public opinion during Yugoslavia sbreakdown.Two young Slovene poets from Austria, Cvetka Lipua
andMaja Haderlap, are also highly regarded.Boris Pahor, a novelist fromTrieste, has written important memoirs, as have some Slovene-Americans,such as Metod Mila%0ń.Ela Peroci, Slovenia s most famous children s author111 who was comparable in renown to America s Dr Seuss, died in late 2001 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]