France Prešeren (Vrba 1800 – Kranj 1849), poet and lawyer, has been canonized as the Slovenian “national poet”. He was born as the third of eight children in a respected Upper Carniolan peasant family. His mother was literate, knew German, and intended Prešeren for the priesthood. At school in Ljubljana (1812-13), his talent was spotted and encouraged by his teacher Valentin Vodnik. While finishing his studies at Vienna University, he dropped his clerical vocation and enrolled as a law student, providing for himself by various means (scholarships, work as a private tutor). He graduated with a doctorate in law in 1828. While in Vienna, he presented his early poetry in 1825 to the philologist Jernej Kopitar, who advised patience and a more polished reworking of his texts. After obtaining his degree, Prešeren returned to Ljubljana, Carniola, where he planned to practice law. After his jurisprudential qualification exam (1832), several applications for his own law practice were unsuccessful because of his bohemian lifestyle, which raised the suspicion of his being a Freigeist. Ultimately (1846), he was allowed to practise in the provincial town of Kranj, where he worked until his death.

Prešeren’s private and emotional life was marked by a series of unhappy, platonic relations or flirtations with mostly much younger women. Julija Primic, the German-speaking daughter of a rich Ljubljana merchant family, he poetically idealized as a Petrarchan “Laura” (1833-36); from 1839 he entered into a relationship with the housemaid Ana Jelovšek, by whom he had three illegitimate children (witness his popular 1845 lyrical song Nezakonska mati, “The illegitimate mother”). In the 1830s, he reconnected with friends from his school days (Matija Čop, Andrej Smole, and Miha Kastelic), with whom he founded an important literary circle around the almanac Krajnska čbelica. His comrades in this circle died young (Čop in 1835, the Polish deportee Emil Korytko in 1839, Smole in 1840), which (added to his professional and amorous disappointments) worsened his sense of failure. Consequently, depressive and self-destructive traits in his otherwise introverted, balanced, kind, and occasionally jovial character began to prevail. He took to drink, attempted suicide, and became neglectful of himself. However, he persevered with publishing or circulating his poems. His volume of Poezije (“Poems”) was published in very early 1847 and, although it did not sell well, was welcomed by some Slovenian and German critics. Prešeren participated marginally in the revolutionary events of 1848; he died of liver cirrhosis in 1849.

Prešeren is the figurehead of Slovenian Romanticism. Although Slovenian was his mother tongue and he consistently wanted to render it a vehicle of literature and culture, he was (like most Central European intellectuals at the time) functionally bilingual in German and also used that language for correspondence, poems (e.g. the elegy Dem Andenken des Matthias Čop, 1835), or translations (e.g. Mickiewicz’s sonnet Rezygnacja, “Resignation”). Although his poetry is typically Romantic in its themes and genres, it also includes occasional songs, and satirical, humorous, folkloric, jovial, or anacreontic verse. His most celebrated work from the 1830s – ballads, Spanish romances, elegies, sonnets, ghazals, and a verse-tale – are marked by classicist imagery, neo-Petrarchism, and reliance on earlier literary models. This universalist, historicist, and classicist quality, which is also recognizable in his translations of Bürger and Byron, came to Prešeren by way of his erudite friend, the philologist and aesthetician Čop. Prešeren’s work was circulated in oral recitation, in manuscripts, leaflets, and pamphlets, as well as in printed form for a wider public (e.g. in the almanac Krajnska čbelica, in the literary supplement to the Laibacher Zeitung entitled Illyrisches Blatt, and in the weekly Novice). His publishing involved many clashes with the censorship of the Metternich years. Kopitar, the imperial censor for Slavic publications, became the hardest opponent of Prešeren’s circle. Prešeren’s first printed book, the historical verse tale Krst pri Savici (“The Baptism by the Savica”, 1836), appeared in 600 copies.

From the point of view of Romantic Nationalism, his most important works are the satire Nova pisarija (“New Writing”, 1831), Sonetni venec (“A Wreath of Sonnets”, 1834), the epic-narrative poem Krst pri Savici (“The Baptism by the Savica”, 1836), and Zdravljica (“A Toast”, 1844). The satirical dialogue Nova pisarija, written in terza rima after the pattern of Alfieri’s I pedanti, features Prešeren’s attack on the utilitarian, purist, moralist, and rustic notions of Slovenian national culture advocated by Kopitar’s adherents and the Jansenist clergy in Carniola. In 1833, this clash culminated in the major conflict of Slovenian Romanticism, known as the “Slovenian ABC war”, which was triggered by a hotly-debated orthographic reform sponsored by Kopitar. In Sonetni venec, Prešeren was among the first in Europe to use the Sienese erudite and mannerist form of the sonnet crown (14 interlaced sonnets with a master sonnet and acrostic) to intertwine his neo-Petrarchist and public courting of the unapproachable Julija Primic with a deeply personal reflection on his poetry in the context of Slovenian history, present, and future. The elegiac mode of his sonnets is grounded not only in sentimental love but also in the narrative of the 8th-century downfall of tribal independence and the resulting backward cultural conditions of his time. The dovetailing of love confession with national and Pan-Slavic themes is reminiscent of Kollár’s extensive sonnet cycle Slávy dcera (“The Daughter of Slava”), while Prešeren’s self-image as a new Orpheus, uniting the nation under the aegis of literature, marked the beginnings of an important ideology concerning the nationally foundational role of Slovenian literature. The Byronic verse tale Krst pri Savici, set in the 8th-century principality of Carantania and Carniola, lyrically narrates in dialogues the elegiac love story of a young couple, Črtomir and Bogomila, who are driven apart by the violent Christianization of the old Slavic population; Črtomir’s pagan rebels having been defeated by superior Christian troops, both protagonists renounce their mutual love by entering holy orders. Prešeren’s Zdravljica, a drinking song praising friendship and conviviality, was censored because of its rather radical expression of free thought, Slovenian nationalism, Slavic solidarity, and cosmopolitan ideals of mutual understanding between the European nations. It was first published 1848 in Novice after the March Revolution and became Slovenia’s national anthem in 1989.

Until the mid-1830s, Prešeren and Čop and the circle around Krajnska čbelica were active in promoting literature in Slovenian as a nation-building incentive among the educated classes. Adopting F.W. Schlegel’s notion of literature as a measure of civility, they aimed to cultivate Slovenian as a literary vehicle capable of synthesizing examples from world literature from antiquity to the present; in this, they rejected a more utilitarian, Enlightenment concept of gradual societal improvement. They were supported by the Pan-Slavic Czech poet František Ladislav Čelakovský, whose favourable review of Krajnska čbelica was republished in Ljubljana in 1833 as part of the aforementioned “ABC War”. (Čelakovský remained Prešeren’s confidential correspondent for years.) Additional support came from Karel Hynek Mácha, who visited Ljubljana in 1834. However, after Čop’s death, Prešeren began to lean towards more popularly-oriented strategies. Together with Smole and the Polish deportee Emil Korytko, he collected and published Slovenian (Carniolan) folk poetry.

For all his Pan-Slavic ties, Prešeren publicly opposed all notions of submerging the Slovenian language into larger Slavic compounds. He repudiated his friend Stanko Vraz for his adherence to Illyrianism and use of Croatian. Nevertheless, Prešeren adopted Ljudevit Gaj’s orthography.

During his lifetime, Prešeren was already recognized as an outstanding figure by various Slovenian, German, and Slavic critics in the Habsburg Empire, even though his poetry was not fully understood. His role in Slovenian literary life was underappreciated owing to his rather bohemian lifestyle and the fact that his poetry was considered objectionably amorous and sentimental. His canonization as the Slovenian “national poet”, equal to masters of world literature, began with the 1866 edition of his poems by the circle of more radical liberal Young Slovenians. The centenary of Prešeren’s birth was already a national celebration. A monument to him was raised in the centre of Ljubljana in 1905. In 1944, the Partisan resistance movement proclaimed Prešeren Day a national holiday. It has been celebrated both in Communist Yugoslavia and, after 1991, in the Republic of Slovenia until today. Since the German book translations of the 1860s, his major works have also been translated into several other languages.