[In the following essay, Cooper examines the sources of Prešeren's Krst pri Savici, focusing especially on Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated.]

The poetry of the Italian late Renaissance master, Torquato Tasso, particularly his most popular work, the Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Liberated, 1575), influenced poets in Eastern Europe in two different ways. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Eastern European poets—I mean by this specifically Hungarian and Slavic poets—copied directly from the Liberata in order to produce epic poems singing the heroic deeds and heroic loves of national champions. The best examples of such directly derivative works include: the Osman by the Dalmatian poet Ivan Gundulić; the Szigeti veszedelem of the Hungarian Miklós Zrinyi (and its Croatian reworking by his brother Petar Zrinjski); the Wojna domowa, and Pieśni wiednia wybawionego of the Poles Wacław Potocki, Samuel Twardowski, and Wespazjan Kochowski respectively; the anonymous Polish epic, Obleżenie Jasnej Góry Cz¸estochowskiej; and finally the distant, but strikingly Tassonian Russian epic, the Rossijada, by Mixail Matveevič Xeraskov.¹

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, Tasso's Liberata had ceased to have a direct impact on Eastern European poets. But a second kind of Tassonian influence was making itself felt among them. The central concern of this neo-Tassonian wave was far less the Italian poet's works, and far more his life, that is, his creative agonies, his loves, his madness, and his death. Given impetus, it seems to me, by Goethe's drama, Torquato Tasso (1789), this wave swept west and east: west to England, where in 1818 Lord Byron wrote the Laments of Tasso, to France, where spurious “new” works of Tasso were being discovered; and east, where poets from sentimentalist to romantic adopted Tasso as one of their heroic forebears. The most noteworthy Slavs to participate in this second sort of Tasso cult include Konstantin Batjuškov, whose poem, Umirajuščij Tass, is a remarkable parallel to Byron's lament; Admiral Šiškov, who translated the Liberata into Russian; Aleksandr Puškin, Adam Mickiewicz, Juljusz Słowacki, Karel Hynek Mácha, and the first Slovene poet of renown, Dr. Francè Prešeren (1880-1849).

One particularly important point must be made concerning these two types of Tassonian influence in the East. In the earlier type, that of direct copying of Tasso's poetic works by Eastern Europeans, there was little or no interest in the facts of the Italian's biography. Gundulić or Potocki or Xeraskov cared little for the details of the poet's life. In the later type, however, where there was a tremendous increase in the interest in Tasso's life, as a forerunner of the lives and experiences of so many romantic poets, still Tasso's poetry itself was not forgotten. Indeed, much of Tasso's other poetry (beyond the Liberata and the Aminta, his popular pastoral poem) was “discovered” and given serious consideration then for the first time. The nineteenth-century Tasso remained something of a poetic influence even while he was being adopted as a “proto-romantic” model by his admirers. The romantic poets merely came to Tasso's poetry after they had learned to admire Tasso as a romantic martyr. They read his verse with a distinctly romantic inclination, in that they sought in it evidence not only of his talent, but of his melancholia and madness as well. The Slovene romantic Francè Prešeren exemplifies this romantic appreciation initially of the life, and then of the poetry of Tasso.

Janko Kos, in his book Prešeren and European Romanticism,² assumes that Prešeren's first contact with Tasso occurred while young Francè was still a student studying Italian in the Ljubljana gymnasium. He presumably read excerpts of great Italian poems in his school anthologies. Later, in the decade of the 1820s, Prešeren's acquaintance with Tasso's works was broadened through his contact with the German pre-romantics and romantics, particularly Goethe and the Brothers Schlegel:

This of course means [says Kos] … that Prešeren found the way to the poetry of the Italian late middle ages and the Renaissance (that is to say, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso and Guarini) only through European romanticism and the Jena romantic circle.³

In the first half of the 1830s, Prešeren made mention of Tasso or Tassonian figures in his own verse. For example, an early variant of the poem “Povodni mož”, but not its final version, printed in 1830, likens the heroine of the work to Armida, the chief villainess of the Liberata. The poem “Glosa” (1834) lists Tasso among the many noteworthy poets of antiquity and the Renaissance. And in the third sonnet of Prešeren's cycle “Sonetni venec” (1834), the narrator compares himself to him who “sang the famous praises of Leonora d'Este,” i.e., Tasso.⁴ Despite the paucity and brevity of Prešeren's references to Tasso, Kos maintains that the Slovene poet's works of this period echo Tassonian “elegiac lyricism” and “esthetic world outlook.”⁵ The very fact Kos offers no substantiation for this view, however, other than the three mentionings above, leads me to conclude that Prešeren's contact with Tasso through 1834 remained largely superficial, that his interest lay more in Tasso's biography than in his poetry, in short, that influence—the molding of one writer's thought by another's—was in this case not yet present.⁶

The year 1828 however marked the beginnings of a change in Prešeren's appreciation of other poets, among them Tasso. In that year he befriended Matija Čop. During the course of this friendship, until Čop's sudden death by drowning in 1835, the Slovene poet was to gain from the Slovene scholar a new, more profound understanding of Tasso's poetry.⁷ That is, Prešeren was encouraged to imitate Renaissance poetic forms as well as poetic content, and, even more important, to move away from a rationalist view point on Renaissance poetics toward a point of view concerned principally with the impassioned expression of sentimental and intellectual desires.⁸ Čop directed Prešeren's interest in Tasso back to the Italian's poetry and away from the more glamorous but less instructive features of Tasso's life. Prešeren's initial, somewhat superficial readings in Tasso yielded, apparently, to Čop's profound and more scholarly analyses of the poet. Thanks to Čop, Prešeren used Tasso's poetry as the model for some of his own best writing. Note two things: following Čop's death, Prešeren's interest in Tasso and his poetry fell off dramatically.⁹ Thereafter he turned to other sources for inspiration. Furthermore—and this is my thesis—the Krst pri Savici (1835), written in homage to and in memory of Čop, marks the very high point of Prešeren's reliance on Tasso and the Liberata. In tribute to his lost friend, Prešeren composed the Krst to display the more profound appreciation of Tasso which he had gained from the perceptiveness and genius of Čop.

It has been my interest lately to consider the way Slavic poets have imitated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata over the centuries.¹⁰ I therefore propose to investigate the thesis that the Krst is in essence a Tassonian epic. I would like to show that, as in the case of other Slavic peoples, the first successful Slovene epic was also written under the aegis of Tasso's Liberata.

Many critics have sought for the sources of the Krst pri Savici. Anton Slodnjak, for example, Prešeren's biographer, sees specific traces of the following works in the Slovene epic: Romeo and Juliet, La Nouvelle Héloise, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Evgenij Onegin, Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod, Bernard de St.-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, Châteaubriand's Atala, Manzoni's I promessi sposi, and two quite obscure German works, Cäcilie, an epic by Ernst Schulze (1818) and a novel by Alexander von Sternberg, Die Zerissenen (1832-1833).¹¹ From time to time other critics have added still different works to the list of sources Prešeren allegedly drew upon: Ján Kollár's Slávy dcera;¹² Byron's Don Juan;¹³ another Schulze work, Die bezauberte Rose;¹⁴ Dante's Vita Nova;¹⁵ as well as all the great epics of ancient and modern times, by Homer, Virgil, Dante, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Klopstock, Goethe, Mickiewicz, Słowacki, and Gundulić.¹⁶ Even with all these, the list could probably be expanded further if one were to consider still other commentators.

There is even a study that concentrates on Prešeren's Italian and Latin sources alone.¹⁷ Its author, Bartolomeo Calvi, attempts to identify the principal writers and works of classical and Italian literature that Prešeren relied upon in composing his own poetry. In the chapter concerning the sources of the Krst, Calvi contrasts passages in the Slovene epic with the two principal Italian sources of the work (the Latin sources were largely limited to the Aeneid), that is, Tasso's Liberata and Manzoni's novel, I promessi sposi. From the Liberata, he says, Prešeren derived certain incidents for his own epic, he borrowed the traits of Tasso's heroes and heroines from his own Črtomir and Bogomila, and he infused the whole Slovene epic with an absolutely unique Tassonian lyricism, “which the Slovene poet could never have derived from any other poet.”¹⁸

The difficulty with Calvi's book lies in the fact that the Krst passages he compares with passages in the Liberata, bear scarcely any convincing resemblance to one another at all.¹⁹ Indeed all the critics' searchings for influences are ultimately frustrated by the simple fact that Prešeren, in order to write his Krst, borrowed out-right very little from the classics. Works like the Liberata were too distant from him in time and style to have much of a direct impact on his poem. I suspect the grand romantic epics of the first third of his own century impinged more heavily on Prešeren's creative thinking than anything from the sixteenth century. On the other hand the Liberata had long since become a locus classicus, a work poets could refer to freely to justify or substantiate their own endeavors. Indeed the entire “new” romantic approach to Tasso, of which I spoke earlier, seems to amount to only this, that the direct imitation of the Liberata was felt to be old-fashioned, passé. But the exploration of what underlay the Liberata, the poem's motive forces, which were often considered to derive from Tasso's ‘madness,’ attracted the attention of the romantic generation. Prešeren's use of the Liberata amounted not to borrowing its images or phrases, but to reexamining its central themes and ideas and reelaborating them in his own epic.

As I see it the central themes of the Liberata are two activities from which all the incidents of the poem stem, one is the characters' quest for love, the other their quest for profound, orthodox religious feeling, in Italian called simply pietà. The exemplar of pietà in the work is, of course, its hero Goffredo, the exemplar of true, Christian love on the other hand, is Sofronia, one of the four heroines. The poem itself follows the quest of several characters for differing degrees of love and pietà—Tancredi for love and a little pietà, Clorinda for pietà and a little love, Rinaldo for pietà as a corrective to excessive narcissistic love, Armida for both love and pietà because she has neither. The conquest of Armida at the end of the poem, her conversion to Christianity and submission to Rinaldo, signal the successful conclusion of the quests and the triumph of love and pietà over the forces of sin and death, equated with paganism.

The central idea of the Krst pri Savici is also the interplay between love and pietà. In this most important respect the Slovene epic, I feel, is modeled upon Tasso's Liberata. There are two principal characters in the Krst, Črtomir who in his original misguided quest for love arrives finally at Christian pietà, and Bogomila who, as a priestess of Živa, the goddess of love, becomes a pillar, ultimately, of pure pietà. The principal activity of the poem is Črtomir's conversion, which, like Armida's, when completed brings about the complete transformation of the hero. The Krst is the Liberata in miniature, not in the details, style, or tone of the poem, but rather in its very sjužet, as Formalists are wont to say—that is, in how the poem moves its hero through to a complete and transforming conversion.

Let us turn specifically to the conversions of which there are three in the Krst. The least developed is that of the priest who accompanies Bogomila to the waterfall. All we know of him is that earlier he had been a druid. As Bogomila tells the story.

… Prijazno v svoji šegi me pozdravi,
pove da pred je štet bil med druide,
da preobrnil se je k veri pravi,
da v naše kraje oznan'vat jo pride …(20)
(He greets me with friendship according to his
                    custom,
he says that before he had been one of the druids,
that he had converted to the true faith and come
to our lands to proclaim it.)

Later he confesses: “Druid sem z zmoto jaz slepil rojake …”²¹ (I as a druid blinded my countrymen with error). But whatever trauma may have accompanied this change in him is not vouchsafed to the reader. His conversion lied beyond the poem's purview.

Far more to the point is Bogomila's acceptance of Christianity. She abandons her former faith and position as priestess of Živa after she hears the priest outline the basic tenets of the Christian faith. Her one desire becomes to save Črtomir. But she soon understands that her love for him is an impediment to saving him. The passion for him which showed her how to bring him back from war alive is the very passion that must be renounced in order to save his soul, make possible their eternal cohabitation in heaven, and procure the salvation of the Slovenes and other peoples as well. Conversion for her is a traumatic, but still maturing experience, in that it leads her to an awareness of a higher truth and a greater good than she knew when she first undertook to love. She is modeled quite deliberately, I think, on Rinaldo and Clorinda, Tasso's Amazon, for both of whom awareness of real Christian love served to end their bondage to self-indulgent love and false doctrine. Like them, she rejoices in her salvation, yet she cannot help weeping at the tragic position cruel fate has placed her in.

I would like to note parenthetically that Bogomila is a far more sophisticated character than many critics have taken her to be. Furthermore Prešeren, I feel, intended for her to appear more sympathetic than today's readers are perhaps willing to accept. After all Bogomila saves the nation, Črtomir is only her instrument. She has the sensibility to abandon the false faith she has served all her life. She has the courage to sacrifice herself for her new convictions and she has the eloquence and determination to convince others to follow her. In short she possesses all the attributes of the full-fledged epic hero. She espouses a most profound moral vision. Even her senses of grief and loss at the outcome of her tragic love for Črtomir certainly equal if not indeed exceed Črtomir's own. If Bogomila is not well received, it is perhaps because the reader of epics instinctively looks to the hero, not the heroine of the poem for the resolution of the plot. In the Krst, however, the true hero is the heroine, I believe.

The third conversion, for which the poem is after all entitled, belongs to Črtomir. Bogomila's impassioned narration of how she found salvation prompts him to admit that he would convert if she asked it of him. But, he retorts, this Christian God of love has nonetheless proved quite lethal to the Slovenes. At this point the priest asserts that foreign Christianizers have been acting only on their own, not God's account. Somewhat mollified, Črtomir concedes that the pagan gods were in any case only a fiction of the priests, that he had worshipped out of tradition, not devotion, and he agrees to be baptized when he and Bogomila marry.

Tragically he learns they cannot wed. Bogomila has taken a vow of chastity, and Črtomir, the priest reminds him, must atone for his support of paganism and the slaying of so many people. Črtomir curses his fate, whereupon Bogomila reminds him that her love for him is more potent than fate:

Ljubezni prave ne pozna, kdor meni,
da ugasniti jo more sreče jeza;
gorela v čistem, v večnem bo plameni
zdaj in ko mi odpade trupla peza …(22)
(He does not know true love who thinks that the
                    wrath
of fate can extinguish it; it shall burn in a
                    pure,
in a perpetual flame here and when my mortal
                    shell shall fall away …)

He must go and save the people he deluded. Silently, Črtomir submits. He gives away all his gold and

Molče v to prošnjo Črtomir dovoli,
z duhovnim bliža slapu se Savice,
molitve svete mašnik, on z njim moli,
v imenu krsti ga svete Trojice.(23)
(Silently Črtomir acquiesces to his request, he
and the priest approach the Savica Falls, the
priest says the holy prayers, he with him, and
baptizes him in the name of the Holy Trinity.

Črtomir progresses from blind, misguided pagan love at the beginning of the Krst—a wrong type of affection not only for Bogomila but for his country as well—to orthodox pietà. This lengthy, slow and painful conversion, which leaves him shattered and transformed at the end, corresponds throughout to Armida's change in the Liberata, even to the point where a reader in the Krst too must feel discomfort at the complete turnabout in the principal character of the poem. Both Armida and Črtomir are the victims of their own excessive affections, to be sure, but even more so are they victims of their lovers' new insight into true Christian love. Not only have the two pagans loved too much, they learn, but they have loved wrongly, too. Their tragedy is that they must convert themselves completely before they can be allowed to love again. In the Krst Prešeren pessimistically sees this new love consummated ultimately only in heaven.

Thus the conversions that occur in the Krst parallel closely the conversions that take place in the Liberata. Prešeren, perhaps relying on the literary acumen of Čop, elected to view the Liberata not as a marvelous tale of chivalrous knights and wicked magicians, as several Western European poets did. Rather, like some of his Eastern European forebears, notably Gundulić and several Poles, he treated the Liberata as a serious analysis of the problems of passion and faith, and based his tale upon it. Tassonian influence on the Krst amounts, in conclusion, not to the borrowing of words or metaphors or characters—these features are Prešeren's own for the most part. Tassonian influence rather comes down to the suggestion of a pattern, of an approach, which Prešeren's genius was able to utilize as a basis for his own work. The Krst pri Savici is a most outstanding example, therefore, of the Slavic use, understanding and enjoyment of Tasso.

Notes

1. Cooper, H. R., Jr., “Torquato Tasso in Eastern Europe,” Italica, LI, 4 (New York, 1974), 423-434.

2. Kos, J., Prešeren in evropska romantika (Ljubljana, 1970), 136.

3. Ibid., p. 132.

4. Cf. France Prešeren, Zbrano delo (uredil in opombe napisal Janko Kos), vol. I. (Ljubljana, 1965), 111-112, 139, 266.

5. Kos, op. cit., p. 136.

6. Cf. Wellek, R. and A. Warren, The Theory of Literature (3rd ed.) (New York, 1956), 257 ff, on the kind of influence I have in mind here.

7. Kos, op. cit., p. 137.

8. Ibid., p. 138.

9. Ibid., p. 140.

10. Cf. Cooper, H. R., Jr., Tasso's Women: The Slavic Literary Epic (Columbia University: Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, 1974).

11. Slodnjak, A., France Prešern (sa slovenačkog prevela Jelena Križaj-Stefanović) (Beograd, 1962), 286.

12. Tominšek, J., “Temeljna vprašanja o Prešernovem ‘Krstu pri Savici,’” Ljubljanski Zvon, XXV (Ljubljana, 1905), 566.

13. Prešeren, F., Krst pri Savici (edited with an afterword by Boris Paternu) (Maribor, 1970), 123.

14. M. Murko, as cited by P. Roman Leo Tominec, OFM, Dr. Franz Xaverius Prešeren und die deutsche Literatur (Ljubljana, 1929), 56-57.

15. Kos, op. cit., p. 140.

16. Prešeren (Paternu), op. cit., p. 70; Čop acted as Prešeren's intermediary for all these poems.

17. Calvi, B., Fonti italiane e latine nel Prešeren maggiore (Torino, 1958).

18. Ibid., p. 165.

19. Cf. Stanza 2 of the Krst with Gerusalemme liberata XII, 86 and XVI, 60, 65; Stanza 1 of the Krst with VIII, 1 of the liberata.

20. France Prešeren, Poezije in pisma (ed. Anton Slodnjak) (Ljubljana, 1968), 133.

21. Ibid., p. 136.

22. Ibid., p. 137.

23. Ibid., p. 139.