Ivanka Hergold’s The Knife and the Apple: Herta Jamnik’s Search for the Authenticity of the Self

In the novel Nož in jabolko (The Knife and the Apple), the shift from thirdto firstperson narration mirrors the protagonist Herta Jamnik’s emotional crescendo, with each “I” a defiant pulse of selfhood against the void of erasure. This autobiographical fiction breaks identity into mythic and modernist shards: the knife of alienation (cold, precise, and maledominated) clashes with the apple of yearning (Edenic but rotting with social guilt). Herta’s resistance to conformity is not intellectual but visceral; her thwarted escapes and raw emotional responses, rage at being confined, and grief for her lost roots expose the feminist body as a battleground. The diary’s form itself becomes a tactic of survival, its emotional intensity weaponizing vulnerability. Through classical myths (e.g., the inscription on the pediment in Apollo’s temple at Delphi) and modernist fragmentation, the text maps authenticity as an emotional act: to feel is to exist. Close readings of specific scenes reveal how Herta’s body language (shaking and silence) encodes suppressed emotion.