Irony and sentiment in the literary field: Prešeren’s sonnets and the Slovenian alphabet-censorship war

Restoration censorship forced European Romantic literature to retreat from society and politics into subjective intimacy, fantasy, mythology, history, and exotic places. In addition to conforming to restrictions, however, censorship also led writers to evade its control (pseudonyms, publication abroad, allusive style) and, more rarely, to overt or covert rebellion (petitions, satire, etc.). An example of this is the German sonnets written by the Slovenian romanticist France Prešeren in the mid-1830s as a poetic response to the public controversy over the cultural strategies of national revival (the so-called Slovenian ABC war) and the behind-the-scenes struggles over the censorship of the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee). With their illocutionary force, Prešeren’s sonnets are directed against prominent collaborators of censorship and the centers of ecclesiastical and secular power that wanted to keep the embrionic Slovenian literary field under their control. These poems move between satirical irony and sentiment, between the fictional suspension of dominant positions in the field and the search for sympathy for the depressing lack of consecration. The satire against the censors of his elegy dedicated to Matija Čop stands out with its acrostic and the affect of rage.


Censorship and discourses responding to it
Since Freud incorporated his frustrating experience with wartime censorship into the concept of the dream censorship within the topography of the self, it has become clear that censorship is not absolutely negative-it not only thwarts discourse but, through the very instance of interdiction, provokes response discourses that would not otherwise appear.According to Galison (2012), Freud recognized in the workings of psychic and state censorship similar forms of response to repression, such as distortion, anticipatory deletion, softenings, and revision to hide suppression.
It seems that without the censorship of the Vormärz, the discourse of Romanticism would not look as we know it.Conformist discursive responses to police surveillance led to a retreat into the private sphere and the erasure of any social reference from the text.Hence, Heine ironized the "poor German" writer "who locks himself up in his lonely attic room, babbles on about a world, and writes novels in a language that has strangely emerged from himself, in which figures and things live that are glorious, divine, highly poetic, but exist nowhere" (Heine, 1972, vol. 3, p. 557).Heine, himself a political émigré and a master of Romantic irony, acknowledged in his Romantic school that "writers who languish under censorship […] yet can never disavow their heartfelt opinion have to resort to the ironic and humorous manner" (Heine, 1973, p. 204). 1 The mediating trope of irony, then, is the second way of writing under the control of censorship.
Echoing Heine, McGann notes that "the poetry of Romanticism is everywhere marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualization whereby the actual human issues with which the poetry is concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized localities" (McGann, 1983, p. 1).Consequently, Romanticism is known for its subjectivism, symbolic language, abstraction, retreat into nature, mythology, folklore, medievalism, or exoticism.McGann does not mention censorship in this context.But is not the abandonment of literary representation of the world in its socio-political concreteness also a "merit" of censorship prohibitions?Katy Heady seems to support such a hypothesis suggesting that "the restraints imposed by the censorship pressure upon subversive expression precluded the detailed, sustained, and engaging treatment of a multitude of compelling themes, and thereby decisively narrowed the scope of contemporary literature" (Heady, 2009, p. 201).
Although censorship was a repressive institution of perennial "hatred of literature" and its "trial over morality" (Marx, 2018, pp. 103-54), it was, paradoxically, productive for literature because it forced writers to invent forms of expression and channels of communication that were difficult to control.To circumvent policing, literature had to resort to allusions, metaphors, temporal or spatial displacements, pseudonyms, and false authorship, while literary communication found ways to print and even smuggle banned content through the international circuit.As Darnton (2014) argues, censors sometimes helped writers find permissible wording and influenced writers' reputations through their authority as judges of taste (in pre-revolutionary France) or as designers of state-sponsored publishing programs (in communist East Germany).
From this perspective, censors played a role similar to that of literary critics.2As early as 1847, Wiesner pointed out that Habsburg censors confused the suppression of politically, morally, or religiously unacceptable writings with the subjectivity of literary criticism: "Austrian censorship is thus by definition not only a police areopagus but also a literary one" (Wiesner, 1847, p. 279).In general, Romantic literature employed several defense mechanisms against the ubiquity of prohibition.Heady (2009, pp. 17-22, passim) cites conformity through silence or self-censorship, evasion through pseudonyms, printing in less restrictive environments or illegally importing banned books, and outwitting censorship norms through so-called Zensurstil (allegory, allusion, irony, verse, complex forms, transference into history or exotic foreign countries).Due to the repressive ubiquity of state censorship, however, only a few traces of overt rebellion against it have survived, such as letters of protest, critical essays and pamphlets, and-not least-texts that counter censors with literary devices.
In tsarist Russia, the pre-Romanticist Radishchev initially succeeded in fooling the censors with his fictional travelogue Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1790); in a private edition of this work, he included a chapter against their paternalistic narrow-mindedness.Radishchev was exiled to Siberia (Jones, 2015), but his work circulated illegally among Russian freethinkers (it was not printed until 1905) and inspired Pushkin.The latter responded to the suppression of his poem "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" in 1822 with "Epistle to the Censor" (manuscript, first printed in 1857; Pushkin, 1959), in which he called his adversary a coward and a eunuch guarding the muses. 3Under Habsburg rule, some ninety Austrian writers signed a petition for legal reform of censorship in 1845; but it was not until after the temporary abolition of censorship in the revolutionary year of 1848 that blunt satires on censorship could be printed, such as Saphir's poem "The Dead Censor," which compares death to censorship, worms to deleatur, and the hellish damnation of the hated figure of the censor to damnatur (Bachleitner, 2017, pp. 145-46).

Embryonic literary field and censorship
Slovenian literary historians have studied the functioning of Austrian censorship in the Habsburg duchy of Carniola during the pre-March period, focusing primarily on the conflict between the poet France Prešeren (1800-49) and representatives of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities in Carniola, as well as the linguist and imperial censor Jernej (Bartholomäus) Kopitar (1780Kopitar ( -1844)).The plot of this literary-historical narrative culminates in the literary-cultural controversy of 1833, known as the "Slovenian ABC war."Although the conflict ignited over criticism of the alphabet reform introduced by Fran S. Metelko on the basis of Kopitar's principles (motivated by the latter's desire to unite the Austrian Slavs through a common script), the reasons for the dispute lay deeper (for more, see Juvan, 2020).Čop and Prešeren's idea of aesthetically autonomous poetry as the cosmopolitan basis of national culture, which should have developed at an accelerated rate among the educated classes, clashed in the ABC war with Kopitar's Austro-Slavic program of gradual development, which Herder believed was suitable for young nations. 4In contrast to the Romantic universalism of literary historian and theorist Matija Čop (1797-1835) and his friend Prešeren, who relied on the language of poetry as a shortcut to the full cultivation of their native tongue, Kopitar held that national culture should gradually develop from the "unspoiled" peasant class, be based on the grammatical standardization of the "pure" vernacular, imitate folk literature, and provide for the education, religion, and morality of the people by combining the pleasant with the useful.
Kopitar, who intervened in a newspaper dispute in the midst of the Slovenian war of letters and used his function as court censor for the Slavic press behind the scenes to impede the publication of the current issue of the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica, the most important publication of his opponents, is an example of a censorship paradox (Juvan, 2020, p. 221). 5Like the Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Kopitar was one of the best-educated experts and a tool of absolutist thought control.With censorship interventions based on his philological-critical authority, he tried to influence the structure of the emerging literary field in the Slovenian lands in the sense of his Enlightenment and pre-Romantic cultural and aesthetic ideas, which were not compatible with the Romantic program of Čop and Prešeren. 6He did this from an external position, as an exponent of police power, but on the other hand, also as a scientific authority and a Carniolan landsman, who had made it to a high position in the imperial capital.At the same time, his cultural development program involved him in the field he helped to police.
The theory of the literary field, i.e., the combative "field of position-takings" in the systems of art and culture, introduced by Bourdieu (1993, pp. 29-72) for the study of French literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, is relevant to the critical analysis of the Slovenian ABC-censorship war, provided that it is adapted to the embryonic phase of such a field in a world-systemic periphery. 7In the case we are going to analyze, the embryonic literary field in the Slovenian language in the eighteen-thirties had to deal and negotiate with the social fields of the policecensorship apparatus, the politics of the national movement, the Catholic Church, and philological scholarship.At that time, the Slovenian literary field was not very differentiated and was still in its infancy in terms of the number of producers, mediators, and readers of belletristic texts.Apart from book editions, there were few periodical media for literature.
Symptomatically, the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica 1848), which sparked the newspaper dispute and tested the powers of censorship, was the only Slovenian periodical specializing in belletristic literature, along with the German Illyrisches Blatt (1819-49), a supplement to the Laibacher Zeitung.In the literary field of forces, two groups fought against each other during the alphabet-censorship controversy.The dominant network of actors, who consolidated their positions "heteronomously" through their roles in the ecclesiastical (and state) hierarchy, were challenged by the less prominent representatives of the "autonomous" literary principle, according to which the art of language should serve aesthetic function, which was a distinction marker of the educated (bourgeois) class as the bearer of the national movement.The polemic over the alphabet reform is the public manifestation of the struggle over who should determine the character and functions of literary language, literature, and writers.The conflict flared up between the emerging secular group (Prešeren, Čop, and Miha Kastelic) and the predominantly clerical group around Metelko, a generation older.The latter represented the traditional dominance of the religious field over other social spheres, even when literature emerged, striving for aesthetic autonomy and cultural justification of the modern nation-a community conceived as a secular bourgeois alternative to the community of believers.
Kopitar's censorship is an example of the intervention of a heteronomous power in the literary field, while the irony and sentiment of Prešeren's sonnets represent an autonomous literary response to the pressure of the absolutist state's repressive apparatus, endowed with the symbolic capital of Kopitar the censor (as a reviewer with the authority of an expert on Slavic languages and literatures).

Prešeren's anti-censorship registers
In his relatively extensive satirical work, Prešeren turned against various figures of the still-young literary field with his epigrams, satirical sonnets, and a dialogic poem.In what follows, only his sonnets related to the alphabet-censorship conflict will be considered (more on their background in Juvan, 2020).They will be interpreted as examples of how literary producers use autonomous textual means to participate in the struggle between stronger and weaker positions in the social life of literature.Prešeren's poetic irony and sentiment intervene with the illocutionary force of their rhetoric in the discursive conflict over literariness between the established and the newly formed grouping.
In Prešeren's poetic disputes with companions and opponents, especially with Kopitar, a light ironic-satirical tone prevails, spiced with a low satirical style.Similar to Heine or Pushkin, many of these texts yield to the so-called censorship style, char-acterized by irony as a figurative compromise 8 between resistance to censorship and submission to the repressive apparatus that restricts artistic freedom, so essential to Romantic ideology.The authors' belief in an omnipotent apparatus, the bearer of the law, also inhibits their willingness to give a direct offensive response to the pressure of prohibition.
In the sonnet "Apel podobo na ogled postavi" (Apelles and the Cobbler), which cemented Kopitar's place as a villain in the collective memory through the later canonization of Prešeren in schools, the poet devalued the symbolic capital of the linguist.With an ironic trope, he compensated for the frustration of not being recognized as a top poet by Kopitar.The latter persistently refused his consecration, a ticket to the center of the literary field. 9This amusing satire, carefully removed by the editors from the manuscript of Krajnska čbelica III, which was submitted to censors in 1831 (Slodnjak, 1969, p. 22), is reminiscent of Pushkin's contemporary poem "Sapozhnik" (The Shoemaker, 1833, see Juvan, 2017: 66).Both poems draw on Pliny's story, which has inspired artists since Petrarch (Hessler, 2012): While Apelles admits to correcting his depiction of shoes in response to a shoemaker's remark, he rejects his other suggestions that go beyond a shoemaker's competence.Prešeren recasts the traditional motif in a romantic allegory about the difference between a philologicalparticularistic and a holistic aesthetic perception of the work of art.He peppers it with allusive puns in which he equates Kopitar with a limited cobbler ("Le čevlje sodi naj kopitar!"; Prešeren, 1965, p. 164).The ironic trope undermines the actual power relations through the fiction it produces.
The sonnet about Apelles-equipped with a disclaimer that it was not directed against Kopitar's philological competence, but against "his aesthetic judgement"could be published thanks to a relatively tolerant local censor of German-language newspapers.The sonnet appeared in the cycle "Literärische Scherze in August v.Schlegel's Manier" in Illyrisches Blatt on 27 July, 1833 (Prešeren, 1965, p. 341), toward the end of the open conflict with Kopitar and his supporters in the ABC polemic and behind-the-scenes censorship battles. 10Prešeren's allusion to a famous contemporary is not only a sign of programmatic affiliation with Schlegelian Romantic universalism (Paternu 1976-77, 1, p. 241), but could also be a defensive tactic against censorship-in the sense that if Schlegel could afford to make such jokes with his compatriots, Prešeren could do the same in the Carniolan province.
The target of the satire, Kopitar, had publicly interfered in the controversy over Metelko's alphabet reform from Vienna on 6 July 1833, attacking Čop; moreover, when he was entrusted with the censorship of Krajnska čbelica IV on 26 April of the same year, he had seized the opportunity to issue a veiled condemnation of the alma-8 This trope subdues and buffers the anxiety of rebellion against authority. 9Prešeren knew that Kopitar, the "patriarch of Slavic studies," did not appreciate his poems, at least since his youthful visit to him in Vienna in 1825 or 26 (Slodnjak, 2013), but the poet's self-image was hurt once again in 1830 by Čop's admission that Kopitar had given the poems in the first volume of Čbelica a poor rating in one of his letters (cf.Kos in Prešeren, 1965: 341). 10The title of the multilingual cycle "Literary Jokes," a satirical epilogue to the alphabet war, openly refers to the satires and epigrams of the same name by August Wilhelm Schlegel (Prešeren 1966, pp. 112-13).Schlegel's cycle "Literarische Scherze," published in 1832 Musenalamanch is, with its denigrations of contemporaries, is much more extensive and formally varied than Prešeren's cycle (Schlegel, 1832).nac and scathing criticism of Prešeren.With the disapproving statement on his censorship sheet and a pile of marginalia on his censorship manuscript, the philological giant demonstrated his cultural superiority (Grafenauer, 1911;Juvan, 2020;Kidrič, 1911;Slodnjak, 1969, pp. 32-34;Žigon, 1926).
In the sonnet "Relata refero," Prešeren draws attention to the contrast between Kopitar's learned scholarship and polemical rudeness.The satire is a clever argument ad personam, a slander in verse.It feeds the rumor (created by an error in the presentation of Kopitar's grammar in the Paris Mémoires de l'Académie Celtique; Lanjuinais, 1810) that the real author of Kopitar's 1809 Grammatik der slavischen Sprache in Krain, Kärnten und Steyermark was the Enlightenment patron Baron Sigismund (Žiga) Zois.The poet, inflamed by the dispute with the Viennese potentate Kopitar, tries to cast doubt on the latter's scholarly originality by invoking secondhand disinformation, which facilitates the stinging claim that Kopitar is inventive only in whimsical rage ("So schöpft' er einmal auch aus eig'nem Schlamme"; Prešeren 1966, p. 113).
A month before the publication of the provocative cycle "Literärische Scherze" ["Literary Jokes"], in which he dared not mention Kopitar's recent censorship despite the allusive attack on him, Prešeren first publicly accompanied the alphabet-censorship conflict with more cautious German sonnets in the cycle of three sonnets "Sängers Klage" (Singer's Lament).Here he responds to pressure from opponents and censors by shifting from irony to a sentimental register.In doing so, the poet seeks the readers' sympathy rather than entertaining them from the rhetorically superior position of the ironist.In the sonnet "Obschon die Lieder aus dem Vaterlande" (IB, 15 June 1833; Prešeren 1966, p. 85), Prešeren confesses the feeling of being persecuted by adopting the attitude of a misunderstood artist.A genre-specific two-part composition (example plus application) enables a classicist comparison of Prešeren's position in Carniola with the banishment of the canonical author Ovid to the uncultivated fringes of the Roman Empire: Da ich wie er nicht kann vom Dichten lassen; Obwohl mein heimisch Lied mir nicht zum Frommen, Nur Mißgunst mir bereitet, blindes Hassen, Vergebt! daß ich, ihm folgend, unternommen, In Worte meinen innern Gram zu fassen, Die ich von meiner Mutter nicht vernommen.(Prešeren 1966, p. 85) According to a tradition known to Prešeren and his readers, Emperor Augustus banished Ovid to the city of Tomi on the Black Sea, presumably because of the moral turpitude of his erotic poems.On the outskirts of the empire, Ovid began to write poems in a foreign, "barbaric" language.This example is meant to suggest that the author sees the moral protest of the book reviser Jurij Pavšek, 11 an influential Carnio-lan clergyman, and the ensuing censorship as acts of his expulsion to the margins of the domestic literary field.He also uses the classicist comparison to Ovid's exile to justify the exchange of his native language, still not recognized in the public sphere, for the officially-culturally established German.Even though the intertextual trope, which inverts the actual sociolinguistic hierarchy, implicitly equates Slovenian with Latin and German with the "barbaric" language, the latter appears as a refuge subject to less strict moralism than Slovenian; therefore, German offers a latitude in expressing oneself more freely.This elegiac sonnet speaks about censorship, albeit indirectly: it metaphorizes the experience of being censored (in the context of other constraints in the field) without naming or alluding to censorship.
Whereas the two printed sonnets of "Singer's Lament" 12 represent a painful and sentimental introspection, affectivity turns aggressively outward in the sonnet "Ihr hörtet von der Zwerge argem Sinnen" (You have heard of the dwarves' evil minds; it should have appeared in IB, 29 June 1833, but remained unpublished until 1868), where emotion is replaced by irony.Unlike the previous sonnets, which only evoke the subjective experience of censorship, this satire overcomes the imposed selfcontrol by daring to name the perpetrators of the poet's depressive condition.Here, Prešeren unflinchingly attacks Kopitar precisely in his role as censor: Ihr hörtet von der Zwerge argem Sinnen: Wie diese ungestalten, rothbehaarten.Unholde gierig Geld zusammenscharrten, Wie sie auch schöne Mädchen wollten minnen; Wie sie, da stets gescheitert ihr Beginnen, Entführt die Holden, und auf steilen Warten.Sie hinter Schloß und Riegel streng verwahrten, Daß niemand könnte ihre Gunst gewinnen.Was einst ersonnen müssige Gemüter, Ward heutzutage wahr, ich hab' die Spur.Von einem solchen schnöden Mädchenhüter.-. »Wie heißt der Wicht?« »»Her Bartelmä Kopiter.««.»Die Schöne?« »»Krainische Literatur.««.»Der Riegel, der ihm zu Gebot?« »»Zensur.««.(Prešeren 1966, p. 114) Prešeren's typical mocking tone mutates here into crude personal insults due to a fierce affective involvement.Similar to Pushkin's "Epistle to the Censor," which cari- 12 The register of the second sonnet of this cycle, "Wohl ihm, dem fremd geblieben das Erkennen," is sentimental as well (IB, 22 June 1833;Prešeren 1966, p. 108).Similar to the sonnet about leaving his native village or the elegy "Farewell to Youth," Prešeren derives the lyrical micro-narrative from the biblical topos of the perniciousness of knowledge.At the same time, petrified metaphors about blindness and insight come to life: The removal of the blindfold signifies the end of unreal subjective illusions about poetry.The external reality of misunderstanding and hostility penetrates the interior with burning rays ("Warum kam von den Augen weg die Binde, / Die mir die Strahlen barg, die nun so brennen!").The traumatic insight is the source of the depressive feeling of meaninglessness that occurs repeatedly in the poet's work.
catures the oppressor of poets as the eunuch-like guardian of the muses, the sonnet compares Kopitar to the "disgusting guardian of girls" who imprisons a beautyan allegory of Carniolan literature-in the castle of censorship.Prešeren topically decodes the fairy tale parable to shoot at a clearly defined targets-Kopitar and censorship.Naturally, Prešeren could not expect that his open attack on censorship as such would be published in a newspaper; moreover, this would violate the norm of protecting the reputation of the authorities (cf.Kidrič, 1938, pp. CCCXLII-III).
The "Literary Jokes" ended the combative period of Prešeren's confrontations with censorship and those who used it in 1833 to intervene in the literary field from outside positions of power and to prevent the breakthrough of the Romantic-cosmopolitan conception of national literature intended for the educated bourgeoisie.On the one hand, Prešeren goes so far as to use irony and caricature to defame the personalities, works, and views of his opponents.In this way, he delegitimizes in poetic fiction the established individuals and interest groups who wanted to retain control over the beginnings of literary practice in the Slovenian language.On the other hand, the poet arouses sentimental sympathies through the example of a classical literary exile.He presents himself as a misunderstood poet devoted to the ideals of Romanticism, the nation, and love.At the same time, powerful actors in the ecclesiastical and secular hierarchy appear to marginalize him or even push him beyond the nascent national literature instead of giving him recognition and consecration as a promising author.
Prešeren's poetic response to the tensions, constraints, and limitations that pervade the literary field is itself embedded in the limitations imposed by the codification of the sonnet genre and rhetoric.Thus, the affectivity that emerges at the interface of the individual's body and psyche from their fluid relations to the actions of actors in the social environment (cf.Massumi, 2002;Gregg & Seigworth, 2010) is symbolically represented in the subject's emotional code.The latter is ultimately mapped in the modalities of genre and the rhetoric of writing (cf.Winko, 2003).Social antagonism with the actors subjugating the individual penetrates the thinking and acting body through the intensity of affects.They oscillate between patient submission and rebellious subversion of the master.In our case, the modality of sentiment represents a patient-suffering affectivity, while the modality of irony and the genre of satire evoke a rebellious affectivity.

The acrostic of a poetic threatening
In the summer of 1835, after Čop's unfortunate death, Prešeren again turned against his censors Pauschek in Stelzich in the German "Sonnet": An böser Wunde leidend muß entsenden.Poiantos Sohn die Pfeile, die vom Bogen.Alcides' sicher stets ihr Ziel erflogen, Um Wölf' und Schlangen von sich abzuwenden.Schwer wird es ihm, sie also zu verschwenden; Erliegen, wenn der Seher nicht gelogen, Kann Troia nicht, bis er nicht hingezogen, 1 3 Und seine Pfeile nicht den Kampf beenden.Steht ab von mir, dem schmerzdurchwühlten, wunden, Erprobet nicht des Liedes sich're Pfeile, Laβt den das bess're Ziel, das sie gefunden!Zähmt eu'ren Muth, auf daß euch nicht ereile.Ihr Wurf, ich warne euch in guten Stunden, Chorwölf'!euch wird Lykambes' Tod zutheile!(Prešeren 1966, p. 115) The self-controlled irony that prevails in the preceding satirical sonnets, even as they tend toward anger, is here undermined by the intensity of the rebellious affect.But the affect encoded in the emotion of anger is poetically articulated in the codes of the union of modernity with antiquity, following the poetics of classical Romanticism as advocated by Čop (Žigon, 1914, pp. xvii, xxxi).Prešeren connects the ancient myth of Philoctetes with the legendary episode in the life of the poet Archilochus.The Greek hero Philoctetes, the protagonist of Sophocles' tragedy, should have decided the battle for Troy with his unerring bow.But his snakebite wounds stank unbearably, so the Greeks had to leave him behind on the island of Lemnos.In the third stanza, the sonnet apostrophizes its targets.Wolves, implied in the myth of Philoctetes, are crossed with the ecclesiastical function of the addressees (canon, Chorherr) in the bold metaphorical association of Chorwölf'.The rebellious-aggressive affectivity symbolized in the performative of the threat ambiguously defictionalizes this speech act, contrary to literary convention.Consequently, the third stanza oscillates between poetically staged warnings and actual threats.The threat is not explicit, however, but is conveyed through allusion: The poet refers to the ancient legend of the iambic poet Archilochus, who drove the respected citizen Lycambes and his daughter Neobule, Archilochus' fiancée, to suicide with his poetic attacks because they broke their promises.
The intensity of the aggressive affect encoded in Prešeren's rhetoric is directed against Jurij Pavšek (1784-1853), a conservative Jansenist, a meticulous but (even in police estimation) narrow-minded book reviser in 1818-48, and Anton Stelzich (1791-1858), an honorary canon and censor official whom the bishop Anton A. Wolf invited from the Bohemian lands to moderate Jansenist influence and settle disputes between factions of the local clergy (Kidrič, 2013a, b;Žigon, 1930).Both ecclesiastical dignitaries who interfered in the literary field are dehumanized in the sonnet; Prešeren's metaphor compares them to beasts that Philoctetes, tormented by pain, must drive away with a bow.
Prešeren was annoyed with Pavšek as early as the publication of the first volume of Krajnska čbelica in 1830, when Pavšek complained about the indecency of his translation of Bürger's ballad "Lenora" (Slodnjak, 1969, pp. 11, 19).Prešeren's anger with Pavšek again erupted during the censorship war, for at his request, the provincial authorities sent the manuscript, which the censor Čop had already recommended for imprimatur with some reservations, for renewed censorship to Kopitar, the Viennese chief censor for Slavic publications (Kidrič, 1911, pp. 162-64;1928, pp. 184-86).As mentioned above, Kopitar used his censorship of Čbelica in the midst of the Slovenian war of letters to devalue the bourgeois-liberal faction of the national revival.In this, he was supported by the cultural hegemony of the Carniolan rigorist clergy, who were involved in the alphabet conflict on the side of Metelko.
Prešeren wove the surnames of the two addressees of the satire into a masked acrostic.Until then, he had used the acrostic figure only in the master sonnet of the "Sonetni venec" ["Wreath of Sonnets"] PRIMICOVI JULJI and in the sonnet "Marskteri romar gre v Rim, v Kompostelje," where, however, the inscription MATEVŽU LANGUSU is not visible at first glance (cf.Pintar, 1889).Both sonnets write out acrostics of love.In the master sonnet, Juliet is the direct addressee, while in the other poem, dedicated to the painter Langus, she is a secondary representation, i.e., a portrayed person.The acrostic "AN PAUSCHEK UND STELZICH" in the German sonnet deviates from the immaculate execution of the figure, while the emotion opposed to that of love shines through.
Prešeren wrote this sonnet after Čop's unfortunate drowning during a summer bath in the Sava River (6 July 1835), but it had to remain in manuscript until 1898 (Pintar, 1897(Pintar, , 1898)).It arose out of the poet's indignation because Stelzich's censorship, in agreement with Pavšek, demanded that the very verses in which he identified himself with a deceased friend be deleted from the elegy "Dem Andenken des Matthias Čop," which Prešeren intended to publish in Illyrisches Blatt as soon as possible after his friend's death.In them, he invoked the injustices Čop had experienced at the hands of the opponents of his literary program and rebuked the "national indifference" that prevailed in Central and Eastern Europe (Zahra, 2010).The lack of middle-class engagement with Slovenian literature discouraged Prešeren's efforts at national revival.In the censored verses, Prešeren used the vocabulary of his elegiac poems "Farewell to Youth" and "Sonnets of Unhapinnes," as well as poems in which he complained about indifference to Slovenian poetry ("Glosa," "A Wreath of Sonnets," etc.  (Prešeren 1966, p. 291) The censor Stelzich probably demanded the omission of these lines to prevent inferences about Čop's prominent opponents from the loosely implied injustices.Above all, he followed the general principle that called for the suppression of any nationalliberal ideas during the Vormärz period.The poetic lament in the deleted passage condemns not only the rude trampling and haughty contempt for (Čop's) noble efforts to serve the community (vv. 7-9, 10-12), but also the conditions in the Austrian "fatherland" due to which his "sons" dare not profess to be "Slovenians" and speak in their native language, but cling to the official German language (vv.14-18).A series of allusions to the ideologemes of cultural nationalism, pointing to the existence of the Slovenian ethnic community as an individual entity within the hitherto seemingly homogeneous Habsburg land of Carniola, was quickly recognized by the eye of the censor as a political threat to the monolith of the absolutist state.
Due to the intrusion of censorship into the emotionally charged place of the elegy, in which the figure of the mourning poet is mirrored in the figure of the deceased, Prešeren's poem, one of the highlights of his work, was truncated and published late, a week after other mourning publications (cf.Kidrič, 1938, pp. CCCXCI-II).As a result, Prešeren had to replace the censored verses with verses that transform the disturbing inner drama (which has social and national-political resonance) into conventional appeasement: Die heiße Stirne ist nun abgekühlet, Von keinem Zweifel wird die Brust durchzogen, Sie wird von Reu' und Schmerz nicht mehr durchwühlet.(Prešeren 1966, p. 290) The affective energy of the condemnation and mourning, suppressed by the censors in order to allow the publication of the scandal-free elegy, eventually found its way into the indignant and threatening sonnet.But because of censorship, it remained in the manuscript until the end of the century.

Conclusion
Prešeren's sonnets from the mid-thirties of the nineteenth century, discussed above, are a rare example of a Romantic literary response to censorship.That they were written at all, and that many of them were published immediately, was supported by the fact that their discursive response to the covert encroachments of censorship in the literary field was intertwined with the response to the public controversy in the Slovenian alphabet war and that most of them were printed in German in the newspaper supplement, which was subject to more tolerant local control.As an autonomous literary device, these sonnets used the rhetoric of irony or sentiment to symbolize the intensity of divergent affects (patient or rebellious) generated in the poet by his relations with actors in stronger positions in the church and state hierarchy.From these positions, which were heteronomous in relation to literature, Prešeren's opponents exercised control over the embryonic Slovenian literary field.They blocked the potential of the weaker Krajnska čbelica group, from which the idea of a verbal art with an aesthetic and nationally constitutive role emerged.With their illocutionary force, Prešeren's sonnets were directed against the collaborators of censorship and other ecclesiastical and secular power centers that wanted to keep Slovenian literature under their control and within the framework of the conservative Enlightenment and combine the harmlessly pleasant with the instructive.Prešeren's antagonists favored the linguistic and folkloristic cultivation of literary Slovenian over the emerging bourgeois idea of national literature.Prešeren's sonnets move between irony and sentiment, between defiant playful rebellion and resigned withdrawal into oneself, between fictional undermining of the rival's cultural and political power and seeking sympathy with the misunderstood poet who was aware of his greatness.With its hidden acrostic and the affects of anger and threat, the sonnet stands out with which Prešeren reacted to the censorship of the elegy in memory of Čop.