Prešeren Square

What Shakespeare is to the English, Racine to the French, Dante to the Italians, Goethe to the Germans, Pushkin to the Russians, and Mickiewicz to the Poles, Prešeren is to the Slovenes.

France Prešeren

At the end of 1846, a collection of poems was published in Ljubljana such as Slovenes had never seen before and have not seen since: Poezije, the work of Slovenia's greatest poet France Prešeren (1800-1849).

In the framework of the European Romantic Movement, the author of Poezije France Prešeren is an equal contemporary of the greatest Romantic poets since he used their common themes, forms, and ideas in metaphors that can be compared with the creations of the greatest European lyricists from Antiquity to modern times.

According to incomplete bibliographic data, sixty-six editions of Poezije have been published to date, averaging around 10,000 copies per edition.

A number of poems from Poezije have also been translated into English.

His poetry is a symbol of longing for love and freedom, which is why one of his poems became the national anthem (Zdravljica).

Prešeren was born into a peasant family, the third of eight children, on December 3, 1800, in the village of Vrba, not far from today's well-known tourist centre of Bled. He had to leave home quite early (1808 or 18909) because his clergymen uncles took him to live with them and arranged for his education. Thus, he attended primary school in Ribnica and then in Ljubljana, where he finished six grades of secondary school and two years of philosophy. In 1821, he went to Vienna where he finished a third year of philosophy. He entered the Faculty of Law in 1822, graduated in 1826, and in 1828 received his doctoral degree in law. In the summer of 1828, he returned to Ljubljana, practising in law firms, and at court, and in l832, he passed his bar exam in Klagenfurt. He then decided to pursued a career in law, which seemed to offer the most independence. His career, however, was not a happy one. He answered public tenders for an independent lawyer five times without success and this remained a clerk in the office of Ljubljana lawyer B.Crobath for fourteen years. He was a capable lawyer, and the reasons for the official rejections were essentially political, primarily a result of his nonconformity.

He also came into conflict with the majority opinion in his home territory regarding the essential questions of literature. He refused to accept the simplified didactic type of domestic literature and oriented himself toward aesthetically demanding and free poetry.

On his professional path, he was granted an independent law office in Kranj only after his sixth petition in 1846. He moved there, spiritually exhausted but still capable of decisively managing several collective law suits of Kranj citizens and farmers against the ruling authorities.

A little over two years after moving to Kranj, he died of cirrhosis of the liver on February 8, 1849, leaving great debts. His last conversations on his deathbed were therefore about who would pay for the funeral. His grave is in the old Kranj cemetery that now bears the name Prešernov gaj (Prešeren Grove).

Slovenia Quaterly Magazine
Excerpt from the text by Boris Paternu "On the 150th Anniversary of the Poet's Death"