Slovenes, (the people who form ) a nation of two million in the heart of Europe, achieved independence for the first time in their long history with the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991. Having settled in the Alps in the sixth century AD, they succeeded in preserving their language, identity and culture largely through poetry and fiction: their greatest national hero is not a general but a romantic poet. With the arrival of independent statehood and membership of the European Union and NATO, Slovenian literature has been freed of its function as the guardian of national identity and is now...