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Short story was born hundreds of years ago. That time Bocaccio's short stories were told to be the most modern (actually, because they were new not only as short stories, but as literary genre too.)

The short story basicly hasn't changed at all. It deals with the daily life, with the real or the understandable aspects of life. It deals with human stories - I mean with people's - and feelings like it always did.

Even the structure of the short story hasn't changed. It has its basic and static structure as already Bocaccio used to write with.

The most important and the basic idea of short story as a way of literary self expression is well described by F. Schlegel:

"The most important in the action of the short story is the subjectivity of the writer."

I think this sentence may be the only key to understand the short story, and the question of modernism. The modernism is (and of chourse has always been) relative.

This relativity is the changing of stiles, eras, and ideas in literarure. This is, what was always new: the new ways, aspects of representation of the theme. But this new ideas have never changed the short story as a literary genre itself. It has the same form even today.

Why are than this stories told to be modern? First of all, I think because they are new. And because they are written with the actual aspects, the actual (or let me say, insted of actual: fashionable) way of expressing the fashionable ideas.

In the twentieth century you can see the same effect in many cases. For example the most representative case is, what happened to the avantgarde, and other movements of the first half of our century. This movements had tought to be eternal, they had started with the idea to take long, but they got already "old". This is normal and it was always so. It is the same today. Some works of this book will become evergreens, some not. Some will be famous and wellknown, some will get forgotten. I think to speak about this short stories as modern, is possible only with the aspect, that they are new, they are from our days. And being new, and contemperary we feel them nearer them than the others, "older" ones. This is the point, which makes them modern.