Poet Srečko Kosovel, an exceptional visionary and contributor to the creation of the European avant-garde, died on 27 March 1926 at the age of 22. He was only at the beginning of his artistic path, but he nevertheless created an impressive opus and tried himself out in several poetic directions.
Often a genius is recognised only after they are dead and gone. Poet Srečko Kosovel is far from being the sole Slovenian example, but he is definitely the one getting the most publicity this year; a hundred years will have passed since his birth this March. Passing away at the age of 22, Kosovel was only at the beginning of his artistic path, but he nevertheless created an impressive opus and tried himself out in several poetic directions. As if he had an inkling...
Srečko Kosovel did not live the way or in order to become a romantic literary hero, an Arthur Rimbaud, after his death, although some of his biographical data seem suitable enough. He spent his childhood and early youth in the region of Kras, which he left for Ljubljana to work on Slavonic and Romance studies. There he associated with young intellectuals, who usually gathered in rented rooms, substituting "spiritual nourishment" for what they lacked in material means. The one discussing and arguing about arts and society most fervently was Kosovel, who, to the surprise of his contemporaries, possessed tremendous energy despite his weak physique. The confident poet passionately followed the world's artistic trends of the time and accordingly began to think of Ljubljana as increasingly small and of Paris as an increasingly attractive city. Nonetheless, he had to content himself with the reports his friends made about their visits to European capitals.
Kosovel was a great seeker of moral values, a trait that associated him with the political and cultural left-wingers after World War I. He labelled contemporary Slovenian society and culture bourgeois, false and unethical, and thought that only the proletariat could bring about new moral and social values. He believed, however, that the proletariat could only be liberated through a catharsis of humanity, following the destruction of man's world. Kosovel put his visions on paper sometime later, after he had "swotted up" impressionist expression.
Kosovel dedicated his early impressionist poems to the Kras, his mother and the premonition of death. His poetic motifs are often very symbolic, a feature even more clear-cut in his expressionist poems. In these, he switched from sensual and emotional impressions to the portrayal of ethic experiences; he abandoned harmony for pathos, visionariness and abstract mental symbols. His best expressionist poems discuss the personal and collective apocalypse; his poem Ecstasy of Death proved dreadfully foreboding: the old Europe will die, and its decline will be accompanied by natural and social disasters caused by capitalism-oriented and nature-alienated European man. Kosovel built up his radical poetic expression into "conses" as he called his constructivist poems, strongly corresponding with the same style of art. While the themes remained expressionist, the poems now took on the shape of collage; they were deliberately unaesthetic and full of mathematical symbols and equations. The then and the later literary circles were all but enthusiastic about Kosovel's conses; they preferred his more innocent "impressions". Kosovel did not have a poetry collection published during his lifetime. Prospects were good for his Golden Boat, which Kosovel found more than satisfying, but the collection happened to be removed from the publishing programme and the poet died of meningitis soon afterwards.
Kosovel's poems are always topical, in some contexts necessarily provocative, but everybody seems to like him - the artists inspired by the avant-garde of the 1920s quote Kosovel's apocalyptic verses in the manner of futuristic manifestos, while his poems depicting the picturesque Kras landscape reverberate at school festivals. The fact that Kosovel is recognized by all the domains of society is proof enough that he has established himself as a Slovenian classic, while many a local literary historian believes that the poet is a genius of European - if not world calibre... This theory can be easily checked out by European, if not world literary experts: translations abound.
Alenka Vesenjak/STA