Srecko Kosovel

Srecko Kosovel was born on March 18, 1904 in Sežana, Slovenia. His father was Anton Kosovel and his mother, who was 40 at the time of his birth, was Katarina (née Streš). His father was a schoolmaster and a choir leader. His mother came from a wealthy family in Trieste. Srecko was the youngest of five children.

Kosovel wrote his first poem for a children’s paper at the age of eleven. He was traumatized by World War I which occurred while he was a teenager. He saw the effects of war firsthand by having contact with wounded and dead soldiers. He finished elementary school in 1915 and moved to Ljubjana with his sister in 1916 to continue his studies. In 1919, he made his first serious attempt at poetry and wrote about his feelings for his family and about the landscape back home. In 1922, he enrolled in Romance and Slavic Studies at the University of Ljubljana. Srecko established "Lepa Vida" (Pretty Vida), a youth literary magazine for the Organization of High School Students from the Annexed Lands. At that time, Trieste, his mother’s hometown, which he had visited many times and enjoyed, had been annexed by Italy and the people were being oppressed by the fascist regime. In 1923, he cofounded the Ivan Cankar Club. The club was engaged in debates concerning literature and society, social work, public lectures and recitals. A this time Kosovel edited the progressive "Vidovdan" magazine and began expressing new social revolutionary ideas.

In 1925, Kosovel took over the publication of the magazine "Mladina" (Youth). It had been a farmers' magazine, but he changed it into a left-wing publication. It was during this period that his poetry became complex and shows signs of expressionism. He expressed a dislike for technology, civilisation and industrialisation. His poetry became activist and utopian in nature. The year 1925 was his most productive; he started writing his famous constructivist poems which were full of linguistic innovations such as language free of syntax and logical ordering, freedom of imagery, use of typography, styles and colors, mathematical symbols, equations, paper collages and all other sorts of experimental writing. After giving a recital in the town of Zagorje at which he read poems about the issues of a class-free society, human rights and the demise of capitalism, he came down with a cold while waiting for a train. He possessed tremendous energy, but was physically weak. He eventually developed meningitis and died on 26 May 1926, at the age of 22.

Srecko Kosovel produced more than 1000 poems in his brief career and wrote with a quality far beyond his age. He was a seeker of moral values. His poetic motifs were often very symbolic. He switched from sensual and emotional impressions to pathos and abstract mental symbols. Srecko never published any of his poems. It wasn’t until after his death that his poetry was collected and published. He is now considered one of the greatest Slovenian poets and one of Europe’s greatest.