Dom in svet

Dom in svet ('Home and World') was a Catholic cultural and literary journal published in Slovenia.

History and profile

Dom in svet was published from 1888 to 1943. Its long-running rivalry with the national-liberal journal Ljubljanski zvon was a major feature of Slovenian cultural life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; historian Péter Krasztev describes the "clear-cut distinction between liberal and conservative" the pair of journals produced as "striking and uncharacteristic of the region".

Dom in svet was founded in 1888 by the conservative Catholic editor Frančišek Lampe. It opposed both naturalist and avant-garde experimentations with Modernism, especially the Decadent movement, attacking Slovene and other Slavic writers whom they saw as their regional representatives, such as Anton Aškerc and Jaroslav Vrchlický. Instead the editorial line "steadily opposed the loosening of literary form and insisted on Christian-national and Pan-Slavic values". Nonetheless, it was diligent in reporting on Modernism and foreign literature: it published discussions of l'art pour l'art and the works of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy in its first few years in print, and in 1901 published a thorough review (by Lampe) of the past 20 years of European literature.

Its editorial line remained conservative and opposed Modernism up to the early 20th century, under the influence of the integralist Catholic theologian Anton Mahnič. It assumed a more liberal direction in 1914, under the new editorship of Izidor Cankar, a prominent liberal Catholic essayist and art historian. Under Cankar, the journal reviewed art from more aesthetic perspective, and helped the Slovene Catholic establishment shed some of its anti-intellectual reputation.