Kosovel’s Late Poetical Experimentalism or the Underground Inflows of His “Bleeding Gush”

Abstract

The paper compares Kosovel’s manuscript “Krvaveči vrelec” with the versions edited by Anton Ocvirk (1974) and Neža Zajc (2013), highlighting discrepancies, blunders and lapsus lecturae. Their correction allowed to identify the source of the collage elements of the first stanza in a single number of the Slovenian liberal daily Jutro, released on Thursday, February 11, 1926, a few months before the poet’s death. – The second stanza is a sarcastic rhetorical question, referred to the government crisis, which loomed because of claims for ethnic autonomy put forward by the head of the Croatian Peasant Party, Stjepan Radić, seconded by Anton Korošec, the head of the Slovenian leading clerical party, against the government headed by the centralist Serb Nikola Pašić. This threat promptly waned because of the submissive capitulation of the promoters themselves, as clearly implied by the poet himself, a staunch supporter of Balkan federalism based on the right of peoples to self-determination. – This dating proves that constructivism was the last evolutionary stage in Kosovel’s poetry. – The image of the bleeding jet solidifying into a radiant “vivid red ruby obelisk” in the third stanza finally echoes the similar image of “eine zuckende Blutsäule”, used by the German expressionist poet Ludwig Rubiner (1881–1920), the author of the anthology Kameraden der Menschheit. Dichtungen zur Weltrevolution (1919), a hitherto neglected source of inspiration for Kosovel’s poetry. – The paper finally proposes a psychoanalytic interpretation of the lapsus lecturae that led Anton Ocvirk to read the word Falzifikatorska in the manuscript as Fabrobikoborska, and identifies its unconscious drives in the early ideological divide that opposed the two young men during the last months of the poet’s life. It culminated in 1928 with Ocvirk’s letter of overt reactionary and obscurantist denunciation sent to the Catholic daily Slovenec, meant to denigrate Kosovel’s memory as well as his closest friends and spiritual heirs who ran the leftist monthly Mladina. This divide was pointed out by Kosovel’s friend Ivo Grahor in his two reviews of the collection of Kosovel’s poems edited by Ocvirk in 1931.