Ivan Cankar

Ivan Cankar (10 May 1876 – 11 December 1918) was a Slovene writer, playwright, essayist, poet, and political activist.

Together with Oton Župančič, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, he is considered as the beginner of modernism in Slovene literature.

He is regarded as the greatest writer in Slovene, and has sometimes been compared to Franz Kafka and James Joyce.

Ivan Cankar was born in the Carniolan town of Vrhnika near Ljubljana.

He was one of the many children of a poor artisan who emigrated to Bosnia shortly after Ivan's birth.

He was raised by his mother, Neža Cankar née Pivk, with whom he established a close, but ambivalent relationship.

The figure of a self-sacrificing and submissively repressive mother would later become one of the most recognizable features of Cankar's prose.

After finishing grammar school in his hometown, he studied at the Technical High School (Realka) in Ljubljana (1888–1896).

During this period, he started writing literature, mostly poetry, under the influence of Romantic and post-Romantic poets such as France Prešeren, Heinrich Heine, Simon Jenko and Simon Gregorčič.

In 1893, he discovered the epic poetry of Anton Aškerc, which had a huge influence on the development of his style and ideals.

Under Aškerc's influence, Cankar rejected the sentimental post-Romantic poetry and embraced literary realism and national liberalism.

In 1896, he enrolled at the University of Vienna, where he studied engineering, but later switched to Slavic philology.

In Vienna, he soon started to lead a bohemian lifestyle.

He came under the influence of contemporary European literature, especially decadentism, symbolism and naturalism.

He became friends with Fran Govekar, a young Slovene writer and intellectual living in Vienna, who introduced him to positivism and naturalism.

Between 1897 and 1899, Cankar's core ideas were essentially positivistic.

In the spring of 1897 he moved back to Vrhnika.

After his mother's death in autumn of the same year, he moved to Pula and in 1898 back to Vienna, where he lived until 1909.

During his second stay in Vienna, Cankar's worldview underwent a deep and rapid change.

In a famous letter to the Slovene feminist author Zofka Kveder in 1900 he rejected positivism and naturalism.

He embraced spiritualism, symbolism and idealism, and later publicly broke with Fran Govekar.

At the same time, he became highly critical of Slovene liberalism, published a devastating criticism of Anton Aškerc's poetry and gradually moved towards socialism.

He was strongly influenced by the Slovene Roman Catholic priest and thinker Janez Evangelist Krek, who advocated radical social activism on a Christian basis.

He nevertheless continued to oppose the clericalism and conservativism of Austrian Christian socialists in general and Krek's Slovene People's Party in particular.

He joined the Yugoslav Social Democratic Party, an Austro-Marxist party active in the Slovene Lands and in Istria.

In the first general elections to the Austrian Parliament in 1907, he ran as a candidate for the party in the largely working-class electoral district of Zagorje–Litija in Carniola, but lost to a candidate of the Slovene People's Party.

Already after his electoral defeat in 1907, Cankar had started to publish numerous essays explaining his political and aesthetic views and opinions.

The most famous of these lectures were "The Slovene people and the Slovene culture" (Slovensko ljudstvo in slovenska kultura), delivered in Trieste in 1907, and "Slovenes and Yugoslavs" (Slovenci in Jugoslovani), delivered in Ljubljana in 1913.

In the latter, Cankar expressed a favourable opinion on the political unification of all South Slavs, but rejected a cultural merger of South Slavic peoples.

Because of the lecture, he was sentenced to one week in prison for defamation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

In 1909, he left Vienna and moved to Sarajevo in Bosnia and Hercegovina, where his brother Karlo worked as a priest.

During his stay in Sarajevo, he gradually turned away from his previous militant anti-clericalism, becoming more receptive to Christian spirituality.

The same year, he settled in the Rožnik district of Ljubljana.

Although he remained an active member of the Yugoslav Social Democratic Party, he rejected the party's view on Yugoslav nation-building: in a resolution in 1909, the party favoured a gradual unification of Slovene culture and language with the Serbo-Croatian ones in order to create a common Yugoslav cultural nation.

Cankar, on the other hand, strongly defended the national and linguistic individuality of Slovenes.

Together with Mihajlo Rostohar, he became the most vocal defender of Slovene individuality within a South Slavic political framework.

After his return to Carniola in 1909, he began travelling throughout the Slovene Lands, delivering lectures and conferences.

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he was again imprisoned in Ljubljana Castle for supposed pro-Serbian attitudes, but was soon released.

In 1917, he was drafted in the Austro-Hungarian Army, but was demobilized due to poor health.

In his last lecture, delivered in the National Club of Trieste just after the end of the War, he called for a moral purification and rejuvenation of Slovene politics and culture.