France Prešeren

Life

France Prešeren was the third child and first son born to a well-off farmer and his ambitious, better-educated wife in the village of Vrba, in Upper Carniola, at that time part of the Habsburg monarchy. His mother taught her children to read and write and soon sent them to live with their uncles, who were Roman Catholic priests.

At age eight, Prešeren attended elementary schools run by local Catholic clergy in Grosuplje and Ribnica. In 1812, he moved to Ljubljana, the capital of Carniola, and enrolled at the State Gymnasium, where he studied Latin, Ancient Greek, and German—the language of education, administration, and high culture for most Slovenes. There, the poet Valentin Vodnik encouraged him to write in Slovene, and he became friends with the future philologist Matija Čop.

In 1821, Prešeren began studying law at the University of Vienna. While there, he read widely in the Western canon, including Homer, Goethe, Dante, and the Italian trecentists, especially Petrarch and Boccaccio, as well as contemporary Romantic poets. He lost a teaching job at Klinkowström’s Jesuit institute after lending a booklet of banned poetry to his friend Anastasius Grün.

Later life

After earning his law degree in 1828, he returned to Ljubljana and worked as an assistant in the law firm of Leopold Baumgartner. He applied six times to become an independent lawyer but never succeeded. In 1832, he moved briefly to Klagenfurt hoping to advance his career, but returned to Ljubljana within a year.

On the morning of 6 April 1833, Easter Saturday, he supposedly met Julija Primic, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who became the unfulfilled love of his life. That same year, he joined the Casino Society, a social club for Ljubljana’s high society, and saw Julija at the theatre and dances at the Casino Building in 1834 and 1835, though he never directly expressed his feelings. In 1834, he began working as an assistant to his friend Blaž Crobath, who gave him enough free time to write. That year, he also met the Czech Romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha and the Slovene-born Croatian poet Stanko Vraz, with whom he had long, fruitful discussions about poetry.

Work

Prešeren's first serious poetic attempts date from his student years in Vienna. In 1824, he wrote some of his most popular poems, still under the influence of Valentin Vodnik and the tradition of Slovene folk poetry. In 1825, he completed a collection of "Carniolan poems" that he showed to philologist Jernej Kopitar, who was very critical; Prešeren destroyed the entire collection. He did not publish anything more until 1827, when his satirical poem "To Maidens" appeared in the German-language newspaper Illyrisches Blatt.

In 1828, he wrote his first important poem, "A Farewell to Youth," published in 1830 in the literary almanac Krajnska čbelica. That same almanac published another well-known poem, the first Slovene ballad, "The Water Man," about a Ljubljana flirt named Urška. In 1830, his friend Matija Čop returned to Ljubljana and re-established contact, recognizing Prešeren's talent and persuading him to adopt Romanic poetic forms. Following Čop's advice, Prešeren became a master of the sonnet.

His poems were noticed by Czech scholar František Čelakovský, who published several highly positive critiques that boosted Prešeren's self-esteem. Between 1830 and 1835, he composed his esthetically most accomplished poems, inspired by setbacks in his personal life, especially his unrequited love for Julija Primic. He transformed Julija into a poetic figure reminiscent of Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura.

Reception and influence

Recognition of Prešeren's work came slowly after his death. A real breakthrough occurred in 1866, when Josip Jurčič and Josip Stritar published a new edition of his poems.

In the preface, Stritar published an essay showing the aesthetic value of Prešeren's work by placing him in a wider European context, an essay still considered one of the most influential in Slovene history. From then on, his reputation as the greatest poet in Slovene was never endangered. Today, he is acclaimed not only nationally but also by the standards of developed European literature, and he is considered one of the greatest European Romanticists.

Legacy

France Prešeren's impact on Slovene culture is immense, and he is widely seen as the nation's poet. A monument to him was erected in Ljubljana's main square, now Prešeren Square, in 1905. By the early 1920s, scholars had catalogued all his surviving works and published many critical editions.

Prešeren Day, marking his death anniversary, became Slovenia's cultural holiday in 1945. His poem Zdravljica was adopted as the national anthem in 1989. His likeness appears on the two-euro coin, and the top Slovene arts prize, the Prešeren Award, bears his name.