The concept of the soul in Ivan Cankar’s short stories (on an issue of the motif complex)

Abstract

In the article through analyzing the motif complex, consisting of the motifs of the soul, heart, gaze and dream in three stories from the collection «Vignettes» (1899) («Epilogue», «Hunger», «Human») of the Slovenian writer Ivan Cankar’s (1876–1918) the concept of the soul in his early work is studied.

The study revealed the transformation of writer’s understanding of the studied concept: from the position of the symbolists, according to which everyone’s soul is a part of the universal soul present in all living things (the story «Epilogue»), through the combination of Emerson’s ideas about «The Over-Soul» with the conviction that the human soul is a beautiful, unattainable goal to which the artist strives for (the story «Hunger»), to the idea of the existence of a soul in an ordinary person living an everyday life (the story «Human»).

The remaining elements of the motif turned out to be a constant component of the writer’s artistic arsenal. The gaze motif is used by Cankar to convey the inner world of heroes in the context of the presence or absence of the hero’s encounter with the soul, the heart motif appears to represent the hero’s feelings from meeting or failing to meet the soul or a marker of the hero’s connection to the soul the dream motif is present in the first two stories as the only space where a person can unite with his/her soul.