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238 Chapter 14 Željko Kozinc, the Subversive Reporter Literary Journalism in Slovenia Sonja MeRljak ZdovC A little Bit of heart and sincerity can’t do any harm, or so thought a small group of reporters writing for the Slovene journal Tovariš (Comrade), a widely circulated illustrated magazine established in 1945 that thrived in the 1960s and early 1970s.1 These fourteen journalists and two photographers, all of them without journalistic education or experience, wrote for Tovariš at a time when most journalists in Slovenia saw themselves as auxiliaries to contemporary politics. These journalists, famous for their stories on social issues, soon learned an important lesson: since analytical factographic reporting was not possible in their country, they had to adopt indirect ways of commenting on the current state of affairs, such as disguising their reportages as fiction. In the 1950s and early 1960s these Slovene journalists could have learned from examples of contemporary literary journalism in the West had any been translated , but they were not.2 Thus those who wanted to use narrative techniques had to rely mainly on a Slovene tradition of social realist writing, a tradition that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s with writers such as Ciril Kosmač, Miško Kranjec, Ivan Potrč, and Prežihov Voranc.3 Reporters thus borrowed these writers’ techniques and applied them to their own work. Interestingly enough, their American counterparts had done something similar. In the landmark anthology The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe writes that such techniques had empowered social realist writing in the United States: “It only remained to be seen if magazine writers could master the techniques, in nonfiction, that had given the novel of social realism such power. . . . For journalists to take Technique away from the novelists—somehow it reminded me of Edmund Wilson’s old exhortation in the early 1930’s: Let’s take communism away from the Communists.”4 Despite the time lag between the 1930s and the 1960s, the link with Slovenia is relevant. The Slovene journalists of the 1960s and 1970s could not take communism away from the communists Željko Kozinc, the Subversive Reporter: Literary Journalism in Slovenia 239 for obvious reasons: they were writing in an era when any direct attack on the communist system was punishable. But just as their American counterparts had borrowed heavily from social realist writers in the United States, Slovene journalists succeeded in “tak[ing] Technique away from the novelists” and, in so doing, avoided government censorship of news coverage. Like the American New Journalists, as described by Wolfe, these Slovene journalists wrote “by trial and error, by ‘instinct’ rather than theory,” and began “to discover the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its ‘immediacy,’ its ‘concrete reality,’ its ‘emotional involvement,’ its ‘gripping’ or ‘absorbing’ quality.”5 Despite the popularity of these writers in the 1960s and 1970s, Slovene literary journalism remains largely unknown and unexamined in the scholarship , both at home and abroad. One reason for this is that a theory of journalistic forms in Slovenia is itself still in a pre-paradigmatic state. According to journalism scholar Manca Košir, there is even a lack of theory of journalistic communication in general in Slovenia: “Anything of the sort usually remains on a pragmatic level, without any pretence to theoretical reflection.”6 As there is so little scholarship on the principal forms of journalistic communication (i.e., genres), Košir’s textbook Nastavki za teorijo novinarskih vrst (Extensions to the Theory of Journalistic Species, 1988)7 remains the landmark work. More recently, Marko Milosavljević has studied different journalistic narratives, including New Journalism and literary journalism, in Novinarska zgodba (Feature Story, 2003). In it he introduces the term novinarska zgodba, which is his translation of the English term “feature.”8 When he writes about the novinarska zgodba genre,9 he lists works of literary journalism as examples. He fails to notice, however, the significant distinction between feature stories and literary journalism, as described by different practitioners and scholars, among them Wolfe, Walt Harrington, John C. Hartsock, and Matthew Ricketson.10 These advances in Slovene scholarship notwithstanding, no study has explored until very recently the use of narrative techniques of realistic fiction for an aesthetic purpose in Slovene journalistic writing, nor has anyone suggested that Slovene journalists deliberately used these techniques to avoid state censorship. Analyzing articles in Tovariš to find possible connections between American New Journalism and Slovene literary journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, I have discovered that, although defined...

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