Josip Jurčič
1844–1881
Biography
Josip Jurčič (1844–1881) was a Slovene writer and journalist. He was born at Muljava, in the Austrian Empire, to a poor peasant family, and he went to school at Višnja Gora and then at the gymnasium in Ljubljana. He went on to study Slavic studies and classical philology in Vienna, but lack of money kept him from finishing. After two years of treatment for tuberculosis he died in Ljubljana in 1881, at the age of thirty-seven.
He began by writing down the folk tales his grandfather told him, and his first published story, The Tale of the White Snake, appeared in 1861. He adopted the literary outlook Fran Levstik had argued for, and he ranked among the leading Slovene romantic realists of his day. In 1868 he helped bring out the anthology Mladika with Levstik and Josip Stritar, and the same year he joined the newspaper Slovenski narod as assistant to its chief editor. Four years later he took over as chief editor and moved to Ljubljana, where he stood beside Levstik at the centre of Slovene cultural and political life.
His novel Deseti brat (The Tenth Brother, 1866) is now generally counted as the first Slovene novel. The copy listed on this site carries the subtitle Izvirni roman, meaning original novel, which marks it as a home-grown work rather than a translation. Jurčič is still remembered for his stories and for the house where he was born, now an open-air museum in the village of Muljava.
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Books
Deseti brat: Izvirni roman
by Josip Jurčič
The first novel written in Slovene, set among the manors, villages and woods of Lower Carniola. The student Lovro Kvas comes to the manor of Slemenice as tutor and falls in love with Manica, the squire's daughter, while a strange wanderer known as the tenth brother, the outcast…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.