Srečko Kosovel and Surrealism

Abstract

The hypotheses that tried to connect Srečko Kosovel merely with Italian futurism or with surrealism are based on insufficient knowledge of constructivist poetics. This means they consciously ignore the numerous places in Kosovel’s work that reflect his thorough knowledge of Russian and Berlin constructivism. – With regard to surrealism, Zenit (Zenith) may have also been an incentive for Kosovel. When he encountered Breton’s surrealism, he knew that Goll had developed this term, which Breton then appropriated for himself. This could mean that Kosovel primarily drew his surrealism from Goll and his understanding of Apollinaire because it has been proven that he read the works of both. – Perhaps this is the reason for the discrepancy between Kosovel’s discursive thought about surrealism, which is still sufficiently unarticulated, and the pronounced surrealistic expression in metaphors, in which he already proceeded from Breton’s principles. – In January 1926, only a few months before he died, he again raised the issue of surrealism when he wrote about the three bases “on which modern art is developed” (ZD III, 177); he saw these bases in impressionism, expressionism, and fantasy. In Kosovel’s surreal realm, illogical and synthetic elements can be found composed of images, realizations, and emotions, which signifies Breton’s efforts for the unconscious or “enhanced human consciousness”. The fantastic is thus in a clear relation with the surreal. – Kosovel’s engineering sketches, lines, squares, graphs, and so on do not serve the “evacuation of sense”, as Boštjan Turk suggested in his article “Slogovna razmerja Kosovelove lirike v luči modernističnih poskusov iz zadnje ustvarjalne etape” (“The Stylistic Relationships of Kosovel’s Lyricism in Light of Modernist Attempts from the Last Creative Stage”), but are part of the spatial and architectonic understanding of the constructivist doctrine. Kosovel himself wrote the following along these lines: “Everything’s architecture, poetry, and music, and there’s no more painting” (ZD III, 718). Because of the special status of literature among Slovenians, and especially because Kosovel was a man from the Littoral to whom language was sacred, the futuristic, Dadaistic, and surrealistic practice could not become part of his creative process.