Srečko Kosovel
1904 – 1926 · Slovenia
Known for: Poet of the Karst who died at twenty-two
“Poet of the Karst, gone at twenty two, whose voice outlasted every border drawn around him.”
Biography
Srečko Kosovel was born on 18 March 1904 in Sežana on the Karst, then part of Austria-Hungary, the youngest of five children of Anton Kosovel, a village teacher, and Katarina Kosovel, who nurtured the artistic gifts of her children. He grew up in nearby Tomaj, in a landscape of stone and wind that remained the ground of everything he wrote. The First World War ended his childhood early: the Isonzo front lay some fifteen kilometres from his home, the wounded and the dead were an ordinary sight, and the impression never left him. In 1916 his parents sent him with his sister to Ljubljana, where he lived for the rest of his short life.
In Ljubljana he studied at the university and found his companions among young Slovenes who, like him, had lost their home region to Italy under the Treaty of Rapallo of 1920; his father was no longer allowed to teach in Slovene, and Slovene schools and societies in the Karst were closed. He edited the literary magazine Lepa Vida, frequented the Ivan Cankar Club, and through Ivo Grahor came to know Soviet and German avant-garde work. In 1925, with the constructivist artist Avgust Černigoj, he planned a magazine to be called Konstruktor and began writing the poems he named konsi, short for konstrukcije: verse stripped of ordinary syntax and built from typography, mathematical signs, slogans and abrupt images. That same year he took over as programme editor of the magazine Mladina, which he intended to turn into a national platform for the left and the avant-garde, and he gathered his early impressionist poems into a collection to be called Zlati čoln, only to be badly shaken when publishers and even close friends refused it.
In the spring of 1926 he travelled to Zagorje to give a reading and caught a cold while waiting for the train back to Ljubljana. It developed into meningitis. He returned to Tomaj and died there on 27 May 1926, aged twenty two, with almost none of his work in print. He left more than a thousand drafts, among them some five hundred finished poems. His constructivist verse waited until 1967, when Anton Ocvirk published it as Integrali '26 and revealed a poet far ahead of his own literary moment. Kosovel now stands as an icon of Slovene poetry and as one of the major modernist poets of central Europe.