Slovene fiction

Slovene fiction refers to narratives written in Slovene language about imaginary events, predominantly in literature.

The first narratives in Slovene were translations of German Catholic educational fiction. There were legends about women's fidelity, the most popular being Genovefa of Brabant (Ena lepa [...] historia od [...] svete grafnie Genofefe [...], 1800), maiden stories (dekliškovzgojna povest) attesting a girl's honesty and stories about social rise of an orphan (najdenska povest). Named after the principal author, German Christoph von Schmid stories are known as Christoph-von-Schmid-tales (krištofšmidovske povesti). The first original tale of this kind is acknowledged to be Sreča v nesreči (1836), a family adventure story by Janez Cigler. Critics praised it as the ideal of folk-literature, comparing its influence to the one by Robinson Crusoe. The story earned its great popularity because of the exotic settings of France, Russia, Spain, Africa, Trieste, Vienna.

Translations of popular fiction preceded the original narrative production. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was translated twice in 1853, only one year after it was first published in America. With the exception of books aimed at a low-class reader, German narratives were not translated, as a Slovene educated reader was bilingual and was therefore also a consumer of German literature, and due to the fear from German cultural dominance against which the whole system of Slovene literature was established.

There are four frequent Slovene names for short prose fiction (slika 'portrait', črtica 'sketch' – both prevailing 1890–1910 –, povest 'tale', zgodba 'story') and three standard names for long fictional narratives (povest, roman 'novel', novela 'novella'). Concerning long narratives, the term povest is considered to be nationally specific. It is predictable for the narrative lengths of 20,000–45,000 words, growing longer in time, it is plot-oriented, uninhibitedly didactic, written for uneducated lower-social-class readers and hence of minor artistic value. This definition, though controversial in its axiological part, is suitable for the majority of tales published in the series Slovenske večernice (Slovene Evening Tales) by the popular Catholic publishing house Mohorjeva družba (Hermagora's Society), in very high circulation, reaching 80,000 at the end of the 19th century, aiming the population of total 1,300,000. Three types of instruction were spread by it: religious in Christoph-von-Schmid-tales, economic in rural stories, and political (patriotic and national) in historical tales. The closest terms to the Slovene are in Russian, in German, in Czech, in Polish, tale, novelette or long short story in English; Serbian and Croatian and pripovjest are more closely related to the folk-tale tradition than the Slovene povest.

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