On September 27th the poet, writer, translator and politician Edvard Kocbek would have celebrated his hundredth birthday. Celebrations were held in honour of his anniversary all over Slovenia, from Sv. Jurij ob Ščavnici – the town where he was born – to Ljubljana, where that day a solemn celebration was organised at the Drama Theatre in Ljubljana. A statue of the poet by sculptor Boštjan Drinovec was unveiled at the centre of Tivoli park.
Slovenska matica, a Slovene literary and publishing society, organized a two-day symposium with the intention of displaying the diversity of Kocbek’s work, especially in culture and politics. Several moderators endeavoured to shed light on Kocbek, especially his actions as a part of the Christian Socialist movement of the thirties, his key role in the establishing of the Liberation Front and the suffering he endured under the post-war authorities. Some believe that it is impossible to pigeonhole him as a campaigner, thinker and poet, since he was in all of his various roles above all a rebel who sought to solve age-old questions with Christians and non-Christians alike. Therefore one should not accept the numerous a priori conceptions which history thrust upon him. The most valuable discovery from the two-day symposium was that views of him are extremely different but at the same time complementary, and serve to confirm the idea that he was an extremely complex and contradictory personality. Therefore his life and work will always be highly interesting for Slovene researchers.
Kocbek’s pre-war and wartime thinking are often paralleled with various notable English, French and German intellectuals, but, as writer Drago Jančar observed, Kocbek often differed from them in his higher level of criticism, and he was the first Slovene to equate communism with totalitarianism. Why, asked Jančar in his talk, did he then cooperate with the communist system? Part of the answer can be found in the fact that Kocbek recognized in Marxism a critical analysis of capitalist society and social differences, and one cannot forget about the threat posed by fascist and Nazi forces, which did not allow many alternatives.
After the war they traced Kocbek’s attempts to approach the “comrades” in the post-war period, but they no longer accepted him, as they had changed from a liberation movement into a party establishment. The communist authorities of the time were highly disturbed by Kocbek’s “drilling holes in the ideological monolith”, which demanded multi-faceted thinking and was none too close to the ideas of the government apparatus of the time.
Kocbek always equated freedom with the concept of humanity, which was foreign to the established intellectual order of any kind of institution, either Christian or communist. Kocbek’s conviction was that man should never be a tool or subject of authority, but a conscious creator of his own destiny. In Inkret’s opinion Kocbek erroneously and naively expected that both sides would give in after the war and a new, third concept would come to the fore. Kocbek, once again naively, understood the partisan movement not as a struggle for power but as an opportunity for a transformation of the Slovene national character.
Janez Gradišnik, one of Kocbek’s few lifelong spiritual companions, remembered in his paper the genesis of the intellectual circle which began to form around Kocbek in 1936, and the new magazine Dejanje (“Action”) – a monthly dedicated to business, culture and politics, which was established after a schism at Dom in svet (“Home and World”). Kocbek’s articles, which carried the heading “Small and Great Nations or Slovene Thoughts on the Beginning of World War II”, formed the intellectual core of the magazine, wrote Gradišnik. The magazine’s central focus was viewpoints which defended the Slovene nation, and discussed the crisis of Christianity and most of all the approaching catastrophic war. In 1941 the war reached Yugoslavia and the magazine ceased publication.
According to Boris Pahor, Kocbek is a shining example of unshakeable loyalty to oneself and to one’s conception of the world and society no matter the consequences. He added that Kocbek’s conception of Slovene identity was always consistent, and if he was unable to strengthen Slovenes’ consciousness of their own identity in the post-war period, then it is for present-day Slovenes to become conscious of his zeal.
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