Current Passive and Active Reception of Edvard Kocbek as a Political Creator

Abstract

This article analyzes the latest treatments of the life and work of the Slovenian poet, writer, engaged intellectual, and politician Edvard Kocbek (1904–1981). It focuses on four such cases or actualizations: the books by Igor Omerza (2010), Tine Hribar (2010), and Andrej Inkret (2011), and the staging of the play Pot v Jajce (The Road to Jajce, 2009). Special attention is dedicated to Kocbek’s political thought and the reception of some of its main points by the authors discussed. All of the authors see Kocbek as one of the key figures of twentieth-century Slovenia from the viewpoint of his moral, conceptual, historical, political, or, ultimately, literary importance. These answers to questions about Kocbek and his topicality, offered by a journalist, a philosopher, a literary historian, and a playwright/director, take different directions: their attitude ranges from critical distance and problem analysis via empathy to theatrical intertextual dialogism and paraphrasing of Kocbek’s main ideas. Despite their differences, the common denominator of these treatments is that they emphasize Kocbek’s considerable complexity even further. Among other things, this article defends the thesis that the issue of history (and thus politicism in the broad sense of the word) is not reserved only for the discourse on Kocbek’s essays, short stories, and diaries, but has to do with his oeuvre in general: discussing Kocbek as a political creator does not exclude a discussion of his poetry. Moreover, when discussing Kocbek’s poetry it is difficult not to also include the issue of creation as a history-building act and Kocbek’s “metaphysics of history” in general. The books by Omerza, Hribar, and Inkret are aware of the complexity of the “Kocbek case” and at the same time place it within the broader context of twentieth-century Slovenia. The staging of the play Pot v Jajce also opens and actualizes the Kocbek issue at the level of the literary spectacle: Kocbek as a character in the play of history, and Kocbek as a dramatic character. This is also a modern form of Kocbek post-Kocbek.