Integrals

Srečko Kosovel
English

Srečko Kosovel (1904–1926) is our nation’s most eminent poet after the Slovene ‘moderna‘ period (1899–1918). He grew up in Tomaj in southwest Slovenia, a fascinating Karst landscape that left a profound mark on his creative expression spanning poems, essays and short prose. His verses first emerged while he was in secondary school, appearing in student journals and literary magazines. He was the co-founder of the student literary drama society Ivan Cankar named in honour of the greatest Slovene writer, which published the magazine Mladina (Youth) featuring Kosovel’s essays.

The prolific youth began writing in the style of then-influential moderna, particularly the impressionism of Josip Murn. His early motifs were the Karst landscape idyll, the mother figure and the transience of human life, infused with a variety of symbolical meanings. The greatest part of his oeuvre sings of the land, earning him the moniker “the Lyricist of the Karst”. His poems invoke subtle sensations swelling into metaphors of national peril, motifs expressing romantic love, longing for his family and lingering premonitions of death. As he matured, Kosovel embraced expressionism, developing a visionary social and religious ideation focused on the central idea of the personal and collective apocalypse as a precursor to catharsis and, finally, the creation of a new ethos, a “new dawn”.

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During his lifetime Srečko Kosovel published no more than forty-odd poems, but he nevertheless became one of the few canonized Slovene poets and a widely praised and prominent representative of the Slovene “historical avant-garde”.

Kosovel’s poetry collection Integrals emerged as the summit of his art, a distinctive phenomenon in wider Central European literature. Departing from established poetry forms and conventions, its exceptional originality made waves in the European literary currents of the 20th century.

“Integrals contain experimental poems beyond Kosovel’s impressionist or expressionist phases. Anton Ocvirk, their editor, arranged them into four themed clusters: the first focusing on antagonisms in Europe, the second on the fare of Slovenes threatened by foreign rule, the third on Kosovel’s new lyrical poetry, and the final on chaos and a cosmos permeated by visions of death. In spite the editor’s conviction that poems selected in Integrals were purely “constructivist”, the edition reveals an essentially syncretic nature: fundamental expressionist elements merging with dadaist, surrealist and explicitly futurist strokes,” writes Nike Kocijančič Pokorn in the book’s preface.

Poetry

Integrals

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