Štrekelj, Pypin, and the Definition of Literary History

Abstract

When Karel Štrekelj (1859-1912) in 1899 began his lectures on the history of Slovene literature at the University of Graz, he presented an interesting theoretical methodological definition of literary history in the introduction. The paper analyzes this text, evaluates its importance for the developmental stage of literary scholarship in Slovene lands at the time, but comes to the conclusion that the text is not an original piece of work but, rather, a translation and that its real author is the Russian literary and cultural historian A.N.Pypin. In the appendix the text is published for the first time according to Štrekelj's manuscript.