ddr. Irena Avsenik Nabergoj: Ivan Cankar and the Great War

How did Slovenian writer Ivan Cankar experience and feel the violence and closeness of death in the First World War? How does he deal with death in his literature and in his personal life? What are the possible similarities and differences between his writing on collective and personal death, one of the central themes of contemporary thinking and writing, and the simultaneous writing of Slovene and European writers? The lecture will shed light on Cankar’s attitude towards World War I, as evidenced in his life and in his works. It will present the writer’s service to the army in Judenburg in 1915 and his other personal experiences in which he felt the gravity of the horrors of war, most notably his artistic words during the war years. In a collection of stripes Images of Dreams (1917), written in the context of strict state censorship, Cankar rejects war and violence and expresses a vision of a brighter future for the Slovenian nation. We will also compare the writer’s writings of the First World War, which echoes the horrors of war in the experience of soldiers and civilians, with some contemporary European and American writers, poets and historians.

Ddr. Irena Avsenik Nabergoj is Professor of Literature at the University of Nova Gorica, Scientific Advisor at the SAZU Research Center in Ljubljana (Institute for Cultural History) and Scientific Advisor in the field of Religion and Religious Anthropology at the Institute for Bible and Judaism at the Faculty of Theology. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies and Scripture and Judaism, and a BA in Art History. Her research and teaching work include literary-theoretical, literary-historical and comparative treatises of Slovene and world literature of the 19th and 20th centuries (especially the work of Ivan Cankar and his contemporaries).