PRIMOl: TRUBAR AND SLOVENE LITERATURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTUR y*

With the exception of a few fragments containing identifiably Slovene linguistic features most notably the texts discovered at Freising, which scholars date con-ventionally to the year 1000 AD no writing, let alone literary creativity, took place in any of the numerous dialects of Slovene before the middle of the sixteenth century. In this respect Slovene as a medium of intellectual and social communication stood significantly behind the other Slavic cultures of Southeastern Europe Bulgarian, Serbian and Croatian which by 1550 had not only produced works of art of enduring importance, but had contributed as well individuals of talent to the international cultures of their times: in the Orthodox east men like Gregorij Camblak and Kon-stantin Kostenki; in the Latin west Marko Marulic and Matthias Flacius Illyricus. Slovene backwardness was the result of a variety of circumstances historic, geo-graphic, economic, and linguistic that successfully impeded the formation of a Slov-ene ethnic awareness for the first thousand years of Slavic settlement in the Eastern Alps (ca. 550-1550). As Rado Lencek notes (1982:42), "it is obvious that the modern concept of the 'Slovene language, ' or anything 'Slovene ' for that matter, did not exis