SOURCE: “Emigrants in Ivan Cankar's Fiction,” in Slovene Studies: Journal of the Society for Slovene Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 99-112.

In the following essay, Ozbalt presents an overview of Cankar's emigrant stories, summarizing their thematic and symbolic content.

Ivan Cankar wrote about emigrants with deep personal involvement. Not only was he a native of Slovenia, a tiny country that had been providing labor for the rich Western European countries and the USA, he was also born into a family from which laborers had often travelled to foreign lands in search of daily bread. His childhood friends as well as his own brothers were swallowed by the world beyond the boundaries of Slovenia. Therefore his reasoning about the emigrant is neither detached nor calmly speculative. His stories about emigrants read like ballads, their style sometimes transcending narrative or even lyrical prose and approaching biblical expression. Many of his stories...