Rabindranath
Tagore and Srečko Kosovel:
A Joint
Perspective in a Disjointed World
Ana
Jelnikar
In the 1920s, at the
height of Rabindranath Tagore’s reputation in continental Europe, the Slovenian
poet Srečko Kosovel wrote the following poem:
In
green India among quiet
trees
that bend over blue water
lives
Tagore.
Time
there is spellbound, a cerulean circle,
the
clock tells neither month nor year
but
ripples in silence
as if
from invisible springs
over
ridges of temples and hills of trees.
There
nobody’s dying, nobody’s saying
goodbye—life
is like eternity, caught in a tree . . .
(‘In Green India’, tr. by Ana Jelnikar &
Barbara Siegel Carlson, in Kosovel 2010: 96)
This symbolist meditation on timelessness and eternity makes for one of
Kosovel’s most explicit tributes to Tagore to be found in his creative writing.
A closer look at Kosovel’s collected works however reveals that the Indian poet
is by far the most often referred
to foreign author. He gets a mention over fifty times. Leo Tolstoy, another
figure Kosovel admired, is referred to thirty times and Romain Rolland fifteen.
In fact, Srečko Kosovel read Tagore’s works throughout his short and
prolific life, convinced as he was that here was someone able to show a new
direction out of the crisis Europe in general and the Slovenian people in
particular were experiencing in the disillusionment of the post-Great-War
years. When Tagore’s works were not yet available in the Slovenian translation,
as was the case with Nationalism, Sadhana and Personality, he got hold of them in German and Serbo-Croatian, the
languages he could read alongside French, Italian and Russian.
Taking ‘lessons’ from Tagore’s philosophical writings, he urged his artistic
colleagues to do the same. When in 1925, aged twenty-one and within months of
his untimely death, he was getting his first poetry manuscript ready for
publication, he decided to give it the title Zlati čoln (The
Golden Boat) in direct allusion to Tagore – his spiritual and
literary mentor.
Today regarded as
Slovenia’s foremost modernist, avant-garde voice of the inter-war years, Srečko
Kosovel (1904–1926) started out as a poet in a more or less traditional vein. It
was his potential for growth and change that marked him as a modern. In the
last four years of his life, he produced a large body of poetry (over a
thousand poems, it seems), impressive for its stylistic experimentation and the
need to push out the boundaries of acceptable poetic expression. Searching for a form that
would reflect and engage with the disoriented reality of the post-world war
era, Kosovel kept his finger on the pulse of the present. Convinced also of
the value of bringing contemporary literary currents and thought to bear
critically on the Slovenian reality, in the 1920s, he was engaging
with a great many of the major “isms” of his day: from post-impressionism and
Symbolism to German Expressionism, Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism,
and French Dadaism and Surrealism, much of which was mediated to him through
new, eclectic Balkan Zenitist movement. This meant –
drawing on the poet’s own definition – learning
from European artists, rather than following them in blind imitation. It was
in this largely European setting that Tagore’s writings came to him as a major
literary and philosophical voice of the time. Why did Kosovel feel so drawn
to the Indian poet?
While Kosovel’s numerous
stylistic metamorphoses as a poet, in which he successfully combined new means
of expression with traditional themes and local concerns – his shift from a
traditional lyricist to a modernist – can be fruitfully related also to his
reading of Tagore, in this paper, I will limit myself to exploring the
unexpected links and connections Kosovel surmised between himself and Tagore. This
will help us understand why he sympathetically reached out to the Indian
poet, as it will also showcase a perception different to the more familiar
interpretations of Tagore’s reception within Europe, in which orientalist
tropes are closely aligned with imperialist interests. Moreover, as we consider the
particulars of Kosovel’s historical positioning, it will become clear that
Tagore and Kosovel in fact shared a remarkable set of preoccupations against
their respective backgrounds. For like Tagore, Kosovel too understood the
pressures and dilemmas pertaining to a culture dominated by another.
Interestingly too, with regard to those pressures and dilemmas, he offered some
remarkably ‘Tagorean’ answers.
Slovene’s Initial Response to
Tagore
When Tagore received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, he was not
only the first non-Westerner to be accorded the honour, but also became, in the
words of Amit Chaudhuri, “the first global superstar or celebrity in
literature”. Slovenes too participated in the ‘Tagoreana’ from the early days
of the poet’s international reputation, and their response, as elsewhere in
Europe, was shaped by their specific concerns. But perhaps unlike everywhere
else, in Slovenia Tagore became included in the school curricula and remains to
this day a household name in any moderately educated family. The tribute to him
has also been expressed by having one of his aphoristic poems carved into a
signpost in the mountains – an unusual, but not an entirely surprising gesture
for a country commonly dubbed as a nation of poets and athletes.
Going for a hike above the town of Polhov Gradec, you will come across a sign
bearing the following line: “Travna bilka
je vredna velikega sveta, na katerem raste”. In Tagore’s own English
translation: “The grass blade is worthy of the great world where it grows.”
Given its location, tucked away amid the trees flanking the white dolomite
path, one cannot help wondering about the intentions of whoever put it there.
Was it meant to alert the passers-by to the beauty of “the great world” above
Polhov Gradec? Or was it there to raise our awareness of the natural
environment, urging us to respect, not destroy what may be small and seemingly
insignificant? Was it an expression of small-minded patriotism or an invitation
to rise above it?
Whatever the case may be, the two interpretations of
the above quote seem paradigmatic for a small nation, living at the crossroads
of many competing cultures, Slavic, Romanic, Germanic, and others. They
signpost the characteristic tension Slovenes have always felt towards home and
the world, where, particularly in matters of culture and literature,
ethnocentric and cosmopolitan directions have vied for supremacy since the
first stirrings of national consciousness in the sixteenth century. How then
was the Indian champion of world humanity received amongst the Slovenes in
general and by Kosovel in particular?
Soon after 1913, it was the enthusiasm (backed by
translation) of some of Slovenia’s
foremost writers that introduced Tagore to the general reading public and
generated an unprecedented response to any literary figure of international
stature. Following some of the early translations done by Miran Jarc
(1900–1942) and France Bevk (1890–1970), it was the talented poet Alojz Gradnik
(1882–1967) who devoted himself to translating Tagore’s works. During the war,
he came across a copy of The Crescent
Moon in a bookshop in Trieste,
and taken by what he read he decided to introduce as much of Tagore’s poetry as
was then available in English to Slovenian readership (cf. Bartol 1961). One
after another, the following titles came out: Rastoči mesec (The Crescent
Moon, 1917; sold out within months and republished in 1921), Ptice Selivke (Stray Birds, 1921), Vrtnar (The Gardener,
1922), Žetev (Fruit Gathering,
1922) and Gitandžali ali žrtveni spevi
(The Gitanjali: Song Offerings, 1924). These collections are being
reprinted to this day. Alongside many newspaper and journal articles about the
poet, as well as translations of his novels (The Home and the World, The
Wreck, Gora), essayistic writings (Sadhana, excerpts from Nationalism, and The
Religion of Man) and the staging of two of his plays, The Post
Office and Chitra at the Ljubljana City Theatre, Tagore can be said
to have found a permanent place in the Slovenian letters.
Slovene’s initial response to Tagore, however, was
largely dominated by extra-literary factors rather than any authentic
appreciation of the writer’s sensibility. Slovenes had their own political axe
to grind with the Austrians. In the first substantial article entitled Last year's rivals for the Nobel Prize
(1914), Tagore’s winning of the Nobel Prize is juxtaposed to the defeat of the
Austrian poet Peter Rossegger. In the same year that Tagore’s name was put up
for the consideration by the Swedish committee, the Austrians had their own
candidate, Peter Rosseger, whose name for Slovenes was associated less with
literary credentials than with an aggressive Germanization policy pursued
against Slovenes in Southern Carinthia and Southern Styria.
Against this background, the author of the article
sets “a spiritual giant of enormous horizons” in opposition to a parochial
writer who “fans the flames of nationalist hatred”. Tagore is celebrated for
his love of humanity as opposed to love of nation. His patriotic songs are not
“boisterous fighting hymns”, but seen as perfect expressions of “his universalism”.
Tagore's patriotic sentiments are admired for their lack of anger or envy
towards the oppressors, for upholding the high moral ideal that “the love of
humanity is above all nations” (Lokar 1914: 246). In spite of the narrow
politicized framework in which the discussion of Tagore is positioned by this
article, the poet’s vision of India’s
anti-colonial struggle is nevertheless portrayed with some insight. Here is ‘a
patriot’ whose voice is tuned to the deepest harmonies of humanity, refusing to
surrender the task of his country’s liberation from under foreign rule to a
nationalist agenda.
Indeed, Tagore critiqued both imperialism and
its anti-colonial nationalist derivation, to eventually argue that imperialism
and nationalism are two faces of the same monster (cf. Tagore 2002). After his
own brief involvement with the Swadeshi movement, the first popular
anti-colonial movement in India
sparked off by Lord Curzon’s proposed partition of Bengal
in 1905, Tagore rejected both imperialism and nationalism. He withdrew from the
movement once he saw the close alignment of Swadeshi with Hindu revivalism
giving rise to communal violence. But even as he rejected the anti-colonial
variety of nationalism, seeing it as basically flawed in that it was top-down and
elitist, riding roughshod over many people’s lives, particularly the Muslim and
Hindu poor, he held onto – and this is often missed – to an anti-imperialist or
anti-colonialist position (cf. Collins 2008). In fact he gave his
anti-colonialism a significantly broader base, envisioning it as “a larger
search for liberation” (Said 1994: 265) grounded in a universalist ethos.
It was precisely this high ideal underscored by the
article that was to resonate so strongly with Kosovel, who aimed for a
like-minded resolve with respect to Slovenes and their struggle for political
and cultural autonomy. In fact, from its beginning, Tagore’s popularity in
Slovenia was connected less with the romantic side of Orientalism that looked
towards India for a redemptive spiritual injection and saw in Tagore above all
“the exotic and bearded Oriental prophet” (Petrović 1970: 13), than with a
sense of identification with the poet and his people, derived from a perceived
common goal of striving after political and cultural independence. For it was the political circumstances of
the early decades of the twentieth century, as Slovenes were caught in
the cross-fire of a number of aggressive nationalisms (external and internal), that in large part galvanised Kosovel to
grapple with the problematic of nation, nationalism and nationhood. In
an important essay he wrote in response to Tagore’s book Nationalism and
entitled it Narodnost in vzgoja (Nationhood and Education), we see him
striving for a definition of Slovenianness that – even as it
remained sensitive to the particular needs of his people and espoused their
right to self-determination – refused to yield to an inward-looking or a
separatist stance.
Srečko Kosovel: Life and Background
For a country that achieved full
political sovereignty nineteen years ago, Slovene language and
literature can be looked at as mainstays of cultural identity, and are often
imbued with a strong nationalistic sentiment. It has been argued that smaller
Slavic cultures have forged an exceptionally close link between language,
literature and politics. Literature
has often served as a sacred shrine to national values, and language itself has
been seen as a national value. Given this importance, violations of
traditionally sanctioned forms have constituted, for some, direct attacks on
the national body itself (Djurić
2003: 80; 66). Real and imagined threats to Slovenian existence
in the inter-war period created a climate in which traditionalism and
domesticity were the prescribed modes. Kosovel understood this, and so kept his
most radical avant-garde experiments in the drawer, away from prying eyes,
where they were to remain for the next forty years, before given due
recognition by the literary establishment.
Born in 1904, in the small town of
Sežana some twenty miles away from the city of Trieste, Kosovel was
brought up in a well-established and respected family as the youngest of five
children. His father Anton was a school teacher and headmaster who taught in
Slovene. He belonged to the generation of teachers who, in keeping with a
strong tradition of defending and cultivating their language and culture
against a millennium of foreign rule and assimilative pressures, still felt
their vocation as a national mission. At the time of Kosovel’s birth, both
Trieste and the Karst—the limestone hinterland to the east of the city, from
which the region takes its name—were part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as
was the territory that later became Slovenia. Anton’s proud Slovenian stance
often got the family into trouble with the Austrian authorities. Soon after
Srečko was born, they were made to move to the nearby town of Pliskovica. Two years
later, they were forced to move again, this time to Tomaj, where they settled
for good.
Tomaj was a village of a slightly
more than 600 inhabitants, predominantly wine and wheat producers, battling the
harsh conditions of the wind-swept, arid landscape of the Karst. Anton Kosovel
was also a musician (a choirmaster and an organ player) with an avid interest
in farming. He made sure that his children were given a broad education
spanning cultural and economic matters. By the age of seven, the
Kosovel children were learning French, Russian and German, and the Kosovel
household attracted artists and intellectuals seeking a haven for open
discussion in what were politically turbulent times.
After the dissolution of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Slovenes joined the newly-founded nation state
of South Slavic peoples: the Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes. (In 1927 it was officially renamed Yugoslavia, “yug” meaning south.) Enthusiasm for the creation of the new state, which offered
guarantees against Italy and
Austria,
and the possibility of national emancipation, and the opportunity for cultural
and economic development was, however, mitigated by the fact that a large
number of Slovenes (and Croats) remained outside the borders of the newly
established state. The Treaty of Rapallo (1920), fulfilling some of Italy’s territorial claims conceded by the
secret Treaty of London in 1915 (when Italy
joined the Allies), allocated large swathes of ethnically Slovene territory,
including Kosovel’s native region, to Italy. Coupled with losses to Austria along Yugoslavia’s northern border,
one-third of the Slovenian population effectively remained outside the boundaries
of the newly-formed state.
If Srečko inherited some of
Anton’s passion for Slovenian matters (and notwithstanding the fact that
Srečko did not follow his father’s wishes to become a forester and help
develop the region), he took from his mother, Katarina Stres, a defiant streak
and a deep curiosity about the world. As a young girl with little formal
education, Katarina had rebelled against her own parents, refusing to marry the
man that they had chosen for her. She ran away from her native village of Sužid
to the city of Trieste—the cosmopolitan hub of
old Austria
and then the seventh largest port in the world. There she had taken up with a
Greek noble family, the Scaramagnas, as a nanny for their two daughters.

Srečko with his parents
Srečko’s happy childhood
years were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. A new front
opened up along the river Soča (Isonzo), not even fifteen miles to the
west of Tomaj, where some of the fiercest fighting between the Austrians and
Italians took place. His parents sent the twelve-year-old boy, together with
his sister Anica, to Ljubljana
(Laibach, as it was known then, was a provincial town of some fifty thousand
inhabitants at the Empire’s southern extreme). By then he had already seen the
horrors of war from up close, and his childhood innocence soon passed into
knowledge of death.
For
the remaining decade of his short life, Kosovel lived in Ljubljana, returning
home only for the summer and during term breaks. He harboured ambivalent
feelings towards his newly adopted home, at once a new center of Slovenian
culture and the provincial backwater of an erstwhile Empire. In many ways,
Trieste was more a “home” to Kosovel than was Ljubljana. Its importance for
Kosovel is unsurprising, given that it was the closest urban center to his
childhood home, and that it was of great historic and cultural importance for
the Slovenian people. While today the city is predominantly Italian—Slovenes
forming a small ethnic minority—turn-of-the-century Trieste had a larger
Slovenian population than Ljubljana. It was an important center of Slovenian
culture, where its institutions were established soon after the revolutionary
year of 1848, and the Slovene political party Edinost (Unity) was founded there as early as 1874. Before
the war, the Kosovel children would often take in a play by Strindberg or Ibsen
at the popular Teatro Verdi or Teatro Rossetti, as well as performances at the
Slovenian Theater House (founded in 1903 as the first Slovenian theater).
In the decades leading up to the
collapse of the Empire, however, the city’s multiethnic composition, thoroughly
shaken up by war and further unsettled by old, revived enmities between
Italians and Slavs, crumbled into factions vying for political pre-eminence,
with Slavic propagandists championing the rights of the Slovene and Croat
populations and Italian nationalists wanting to “redeem” the city, seeing it as
a natural part of a unified Italian body politic. Ethnic bigotry erupted, and
with the political barometer decidedly pro-Italian, Slavs became the butt of
persecution.
In 1920, the seat of Slav cultural
life, the Narodni Dom (National
House) was torched by a mob with the consent of the Triestine police and
authorities. This signaled the beginning of enforced assimilation, a doctrine
which gained broad legitimacy as fascists came into power in 1922. Policies
adopted between 1924 and 1927 “transformed five hundred Slovene and Croatian
primary schools into Italian-language schools, deported one thousand Slavic
teachers (personified as ‘the resistance of a foreign race’) to other parts of
Italy, and closed around five hundred Slav societies and a slightly smaller
number of libraries” (Sluga
2001: 48). Kosovel’s father was forced to retire for refusing to abide by the
Italian-only language policy, and was replaced by a more pliant Slovene, Ivan
Kosmina. This brought the family severe financial difficulties. They even lost
the roof over their heads, since their accommodation was tied to Anton’s
teaching post. By 1926 non-Italian names had to be Italianized. By 1927,
shortly after Kosovel’s death, the use of Slovene was prohibited in public.
Periodicals were banned and political parties dissolved. Many intellectuals and
artists were forced into exile.
If Italian irredentism was one major source of
grievance and concern for Kosovel, the other was Yugoslav unitarism, as the
centralising tendencies of Belgrade
were becoming more prominent. It was against a climate in which it seemed vital
to keep a separate Slovenian identity, in order to hold out against
assimilation, that Kosovel’s particular treatment of the Slovenian national
question needs to be considered. The post-war situation alerted Kosovel in a
most powerful way to the pathology of nationalism and the raising of barriers
along ethnic lines, where being Italian, German, Slovene or other, overrode
notions of a shared human identity or precluded the possibility of hybrid or
multiple identities. It was also the cosmopolitan city of Trieste that
sensitized him to models of identification that could either accommodate
difference (the city before the war was a place where diverse groups were able
to share the same territory without too much conflict) or violently repress it
(as was the case once the city and its environs were designated as exclusively
Italian and assimilation became the order of the day). The shifting political
geography of the Adriatic region at once corroborated a sense of national
identity and undermined it. The multiple names Kosovel was obliged to adopt as
governments changed hands (under Austrians, Srečko
meaning ‘lucky’ became Felix, under Italians, he was Felice),
reflect the political and cultural pressures he was under. Similarly, adoption
of three passports in so short a life must have thrown the notion of
nationality as something organic to one’s identity seriously into question.
His task therefore became twofold: to show that
“nationalism was a lie” (Kosovel 1974: 31) and to salvage the concept of narod (a people) from being hijacked by
nationalism: “A narod for us can only
ever mean a nation which has freed itself from nationalism” (Kosovel 1977:
624). Driving a wedge between nationhood and nationalism meant for Kosovel
demarcating the important sense of national selfhood from a self-indulgent
celebration of one’s own identity. Nationhood required a measure of
selflessness, lest it should lead down “the wide road of national egoism”
(Kosovel 1977: 67). Vital input for thinking through these issues Kosovel got from
Tagore’s book Nationalism (1917).
The wider political background of Kosovel’s life is important, since it is
precisely from this historical juncture that Kosovel gained his sense of
intimacy and shared concerns with Tagore. When he thought of the troubles of Primorska (the Slovenian Littoral) under
Italian rule, he aligned them with the “unnatural act” he saw in the
“colonisation of the non-European peoples” (Kosovel 1977: 65–66). Therefore, rather
than seeing in Tagore’s attraction for Kosovel yet another predictable response
coming from the West from within the romantic and orientalist tradition of
Europe’s enchantment with Eastern thought and art, I propose we see it instead
in terms of a situational identification where sympathies are forged
between individuals and inspirations derived from a sense of shared
predicaments (cf. Hogan 2004: 26).
It is indeed
true that some of the qualities Kosovel perceived in Tagore, notions such as
“simplicity”, “naturalness”, “child-likeness”, as also his comparing the power
of Tagore's language to that of the gospels (Kosovel 1977: 509, 558, 561), are
all part and parcel of the dominant tropes that guided the imaginations of
Europeans when they turned towards the East in the early decades of the
twentieth century, and which have since been criticized for their orientalizing
thrust. But to stop here would be to stop short of more fully appreciating why
Tagore was so important to Kosovel or how even some of these same concepts
might have actually contributed to the project of (cultural) emancipation both
poets shared. Without disputing the basic premise that when Western thinkers
drew on Eastern thought – the religious and philosophical ideas of India, China
and Japan – they did so in line with their own goals and pursuits, these ideas would
often serve to question Europe’s established role and identity, rather than
assert it (cf. Clarke 1997: 27). The talk of “crisis” or “sickness” besetting
Western civilization and of the need to turn “Eastwards” for cure that constitutes
the more radical early 20th-century orientalist discourse, certainly
applies to Kosovel, and can explain some of his enchantment with Tagore.
Furthermore, as Imre Bangha has pointed out with
respect to Hungary,
Tagore’s greatest supporters were to be found among the readers and writers who
were born or lived in regions “lost” after WWI. These writers would often
sympathise with the Indian freedom struggle as opposed to the colonizer’s
viewpoint (Bangha 2008: 15). Something similar can be said of Kosovel whose
hometown had been “lost” to Italy
following the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Certainly, within Europe, there were many individuals and groups who
celebrated Tagore, and their response was framed by their perceived sense of
commonality and joint purpose with the Indian poet. They genuinely looked to Tagore (and/or
Gandhi) for moral sustenance as well as alternatives to some of the thinking
that drives imperialist ideologies, seeking to substitute the old mechanistic
and dualistic ways of thinking for a more holistic paradigm.
For Kosovel, reading Tagore meant encountering a voice
that shared some of the age’s deepest cultural and intellectual concerns,
spanning nationalism, scientific and technological revolutions,
environmentalism and feminism alike, and which helped him think through some of
these pressing issues. It is therefore more in the spirit of parity that
Kosovel approaches Tagore, as opposed to an Eastern guru at whose feet one
should sit, or, following the colonial mindset, “an Oriental” who deserves to
be patronized.
Kosovel turns ‘East’
Tagore’s place among artists and intellectuals Kosovel respected –
artists he felt were conscientious in their creative ambitions, striving to
broaden existential and imaginative possibilities of art – is secured not from
some robust act of appropriation, but through a strong sense of shared concerns
grounded in an anti-imperialist, universalist ethos. Tagore was perceived to be
a kindred spirit, not because Kosovel was suffering from some kind of a fantasy
– what after all could a young, still anonymous poet, barely out of his teens,
have in common with a mature, world-renowned figure of Tagore’s stature? – but
because he was able to identify with him and his historical predicament of colonial
subjugation.
He developed this sense intimacy with the Indian poet
particularly as he thought of the troubles of Primorska under Italian rule. He also understood that, like Tagore,
he had been delegated to the large ideological constructs of the “East.” Here I
am referring to the tradition of representation that predates fascism and goes
back to the Enlightenment, in which “Eastern Europe”
or “the Balkan East: is imagined as the Western half’s lesser other. In this
representational framework, Germans and Italians were seen as cultural equals:
bourgeois, modern, nationally evolved, and essentially “Western,” while Slavs
were backward peasants, lacking national consciousness and “Eastern” (Sluga
2001: 2). Such mental geography was instrumental in influencing political
decisions and historic events. What helped justify and consolidate the Italian
claim to authority over the disputed Adriatic border region was their alleged
racial, cultural and linguistic superiority.
In that sense both Tagore and Kosovel were projected
as belonging to an inferior and governable race, Indian and (Balkan) Slav
respectively, with Western Europe seen as the
centre of the world. But if Kosovel could understand the violence of a colonial
encounter, he could also understand the opportunities that came with
cross-cultural contact. With energy worthy of Tagore, his artistic temperament
in the final instance celebrates the meeting of “East” and “West,” and he
extends the notion of “East” to encompass Asia:
We happen to be living at the crossroads of Western
and Eastern Europe, on the battlefront of Eastern culture with Western, in an
age which is the most exciting and the most interesting in its multiplicity of
idioms and movements in politics, economics and art, because our age carries
within itself all the idioms of the cultural and political past of Europe and
possibly the future of Asia (Kosovel 1977: 178).
The reference to Asia is no doubt an allusion to Tagore’s own
understanding of Asia’s future relationship
with the world, which Kosovel was familiar with from reading Nationalism.
And the fact that Kosovel saw his own position defined in terms of an
“East-West” juncture – at once a point of division and contact – enabled him to
relate to Tagore’s own idea of a new emancipated individual – “new man” – who
would somehow be free of these divisions.
It will not do, as Tagore wrote in his essay Purba o Paschim (East and West), thinking of the relationship between the British
and the Indians, “to blame them alone”. We have to be prepared to “take the
blame on ourselves” (Tagore 1961: 138). Both Tagore and Kosovel, for all their
affection for their respective countries became their respective countries’
harshest critics. Both transformed – what Ashis Nandy has so aptly
characterized with reference to Tagore – “passionate self-other” debates into
“self-self” debate (Nandy 2005: 82).
In the same way that Tagore, despite the violence and
humiliation of foreign rule, refused to succumb to a dismissal of everything
British or, conversely, an uncritical valorization of everything Indian,
Kosovel too made it a point to discriminate between imperialist forces that
deserve all reprobation and Italian culture which may or may not be implicated
by these forces. Both strove to override politics in an open acceptance of what
they felt was commendable in any given culture, laying themselves open to
charges of denationalized surrender.
In a lesser-known poem entitled “Italian Culture”,
Kosovel makes it quite clear that his quest for liberation had to be larger.
With a reference to Gandhi, this poem once again demonstrates how Kosovel was
searching for alternative cultural models: as Slovenian institutions were under
attack in Trieste,
Gandhi was launching his Non-cooperation movement on the Subcontinent to oust
the British.
The Slovenian National House in Trieste,
1920.
The Workers House in Trieste, 1920.
Wheat fields in Istria
on fire.
Fascist threat during the elections.
The heart is becoming as tough as a rock.
Shall Slovenian workers’ homes
continue to burn?
The old woman is dying at her prayers.
Slovenianness is a Progressive Factor.
Humanism is a Progressive Factor.
A humanistic Slovenianness: synthesis of evolution.
Gandhi, Gandhi, Gandhi!
Edinost
is burning,
burning,
Our nation, choking, choking.
(Kosovel 2008: 137)
What makes this poem interesting is that the crisis it describes is
transformed into a self-questioning, in which violence and retaliation as a
means of asserting one’s identity (evocation of Gandhi is appropriate indeed)
are superseded by an universalist and a humanist perspective. Slovenianness, if
it is to progress in evolution, must not surrender humanist ideals. Or, as he
wrote to his French teacher Dragan Šanda: “A nation only becomes a nation when
it becomes aware of its humanity” (Kosovel 1925, 1977: 323–324). Both Kosovel
and Tagore believed in the perfectibility of human beings.
In line with some of the most imaginative
anti-colonial or anti-imperialist responses across the globe, Tagore’s and
Kosovel’s liberational stances thus commanded a pull away from separatist
nationalism towards a more integrative and pluralistic view of human community.
What they sought was much more than the simple departure of the colonizers:
there had to be a complex transformation of the colonized, else alien hegemony
would merely be replaced by a home-grown one.
The universal philosophy of Tagore clearly struck a
chord with Kosovel who saw his native region affected by imperialist forces,
perceived as similar to those that subjugated India. Furthermore, he understood
the plight of his native region in the larger context of the plight of all
who are – in his own vocabulary – “beaten,” “downtrodden,” “subjugated.” If the
suffering of his own people was a symptom of wider social forces – namely those
of capitalist Europe with its imperial onslaught on the rest of the world, and
an outlook promoting sharp distinctions between races and civilizations – then
Kosovel felt the solution too had to be sought at a global scale, in the
ascendance of a new social order. Certainly for those writers who resisted the
civilizational crisis in anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist terms, the Russian
revolution of 1917 offered a realistic hope, however short-lasting, for the
ideal of a new, non-exploitative, classless society. Moreover, it unleashed
what Timothy Brennan has argued was “a full-blown culture of anti-imperialism for the first time” (Brennan 2002: 19,
emphasis original). This last point is crucial if we are to understand the
final aspect to Kosovel’s sense of identification with Tagore, in which the
Indian poet is aligned with the proletarian movement, the connection Kosovel
made in a lecture he delivered to the miners in Zagorje shortly before he died.
Indeed, seeing in Tagore a spiritual and intellectual kin, Kosovel co-opted him
into the ranks of those “intellectuals, famous artists and scientists” who had
taken up “a relentless fight against injustice and violence” and who had
“joined the proletarian movement” (Kosovel 1977: 27).
Stressing the links between the inter-war avant-gardes, the colonies and anti-imperialist
consciousness, Brennan submits that “the Russian Revolution […] was an
anticolonial revolution”. This he takes to mean in “its sponsorship of
anticolonial rhetoric” which “thrived in the art columns of left newspapers,
cabarets or the political underground, mainstream radio, the cultural groups of
the Popular Front, Bolshevik theater troupes”, meeting with responses and
contributions from “the various avant-garde arts”. Brennan cannot overstate the
implications of the revolution for the “the idea of the West”. It “delivered Europe”, he says, “into a radical non-Western curiosity
and sympathy that had not existed in quite this way before”. It “altered
European agendas and tastes by situating the European in a global relationship
that was previously unimaginable” (Brennan 2002: 192–193).
The idea of social revolution was now combined with
anti-imperialist thought. This was because an analogy was being made between
the capitalist’s exploitation of the worker and imperialist’s exploitation of
the colonized. For Kosovel – no blind admirer of the Soviet experiment – the
“proletariat” was more or less interchangeable with the “suppressed” or
“humiliated man,” (in Slovenian, like in Bengali, the word for “man” is gender
neutral) suggesting a more universal human condition. Though the poet was not
himself always above a dualistic view of the world that pitted suppressors
against the suppressed, in the final instance he did not permit himself the
luxury of thinking that the solution to the “world problem” lay in a simple
reversal of these dichotomies and the power structures they entailed: “In our
innermost being, there are no classes or nations” (Kosovel 1977: 102).
When Kosovel turned towards “East” for inspiration,
anticipating a “new morning,” this morning, he said, would come “in a red
mantle,” hence its irradiating
core was Russia and not primarily “the Orient” of Tagore (Kosovel 1977: 93).
And yet, of course, the two were closely related. In an important aspect of
Kosovel’s identification with Tagore, therefore, the anti-capitalist and
anti-colonial struggles converged, so the “East” became as much the promise of
a new world order associated with the Bolshevik Revolution as it was evocative
of the old romantic “Orient” that would help heal the deep spiritual “crisis”
of the post-War European generation.
At Home in the World
I have stressed the links and associations that Kosovel surmised between
himself and Tagore, and which extended his vision beyond the borders of Europe, to suggest that Kosovel’s poetry is part of a
more complex, global configuration of anti-imperial politics and ethics.
Painfully aware of the historical realities of his time, where a handful of
Western powers had brought an overwhelming part of the globe under imperial
control, Kosovel, like Tagore, deplored the fact that the meeting of cultures
had come for the most part on the back of conquest and colonization, rather
than in a spirit of free exchange, but argued, against the odds, for a
non-hierarchical dialogue between cultures. How to resist foreign impositions
and yet not bar oneself from the discoveries of the modern age, whether in
science, technology, economics, politics, art, or literature; how to adjust
creatively and retain agency as opposed to imitate slavishly or conform
unthinkingly, and what are the implications of global expansion for cultural
identities – were questions that preoccupied both thinkers. And these shared
concerns were at least in part a result of being exposed to the same
globalizing forces such as capitalism and imperialism and of intuiting common
goals arising out of the consciousness of inhabiting one world as opposed to
separate cultural enclaves.
Both artists stressed the role of the individual and
creativity. Kosovel, sharing in the conviction of the post-war generation that
art was as powerful in directing life as politics and economy were, became a
champion of an aesthetic revolution. And “artistic form”, he would insist, “is
but the artist’s personal
relationship with life (my emphasis)”, so that the revolution Kosovel defended
meant above all an on-going revolution of artistic expression in direct
response to life (Kosovel CW III: 657). The
courage to live out life’s contradictions and give it shape in art was for him
a mark of true existence.
Kosovel’s raison de etre of human beings was
unambiguous: “I live, therefore I can create”. The model of authenticity was
dropped in favour of a model of creativity. “History does not repeat itself,
but it creates itself,” Kosovel wrote, “so our model should not be in the past,
but in the living present that we feel inside us”. Non-elitist in sensibility,
he explained: “Whatever that life may be, the main thing is that I live it;
that for me is enough”. It is on this affirmative stance towards – and respect
for – lived life that Kosovel took inspiration from Tagore: “Every person’s
life is important, and Tagore is right in saying that human existence is
justified by the mere fact that we live” (Kosovel CW III: 87).
Such
affirmative philosophy was the driving force behind Kosovel’s numerous
projects, most of which were cut short by his untimely death. As with Tagore,
there was a strong public side to his personality, and he pursued the needs of
both his private and public self with equal zest and determination. Poetry for
Kosovel was a vital creative force in social transformation; a powerful vehicle
for ideas to be translated into social reality. In this respect too, his
outlook bore close affinities with the Indian poet-educator. Kosovel invested a
lot of energy into setting up an alternative cultural space within Slovenia, in
which Slovenes would engage in an open dialogue with the world. His clarion
call was high-sounding indeed:
We need to raise our
country to the heights of the countries of the world, to the breadth of human
rights, to the depths of ethical problems. That for us is the cultural mission
of Slovenianness (Kosovel CW III: 60).
Driven by this mission, Kosovel came to participate
fully in the literary life of the metropolis. A student of Romance and Slavic
languages and literatures at the University
of Ljubljana, he soon
became active as a writer, editor, founder of journals and associations, public
speaker, and an initiator of many original and progressive ideas, of which, his
world-aspiring and world-absorbing notion of Slovenianness was one.
Tagore’s
vision for India followed a similar trajectory. His whole life was lived under
colonial rule, and yet throughout, he would reiterate with undiminished
conviction that there was one “great fact” about his age, and that was the
meeting of human races. “The human races have been exposed to each other,
physically and intellectually. The shells, which have so long given them full
security within their individual enclosures, have been broken, and by no
artificial process can they be mended again”. This for Tagore was an
irreversible fact of global modernity that required everyone to make a mental
readjustment (Tagore 1996: 71). It meant our countries needed “to harmonize our
growth with world tendencies […] to prove our worth to the whole world not
merely to admiring groups of our own people […] to justify our own existence.”
Problems which had previously been of local make began affecting much larger
areas. Solutions were no longer to be found “in the seclusion of our own
national workshops” but had to be sought in cooperation with different
cultures, through intercultural negotiations (Ibid.: 76). With this aim in view, Tagore set up a world university,
Visva-Bharati, to promote such exchange of knowledge and ideas between
cultures, East and West.
What clearly binds these two poets across the vast geographic and
cultural space dividing Slovenia
and India
is that they were able to imagine alternatives to a bipolar, racial view of the
world. Their vision was driven by an integrative view of human society and
culture. Perhaps more urgently today than ever, Tagore and Kosovel can
challenge us to think about ourselves along more inclusive and dynamic lines,
whereby our local and specific allegiances become a non-conflictual base for
reaching out to the world, surrendering neither, while enriching both.
As Tagore put it in Gitanjali poem
no. 12:
The traveller has to knock on every alien door to come
to his own, and one has to wander
through all the outer worlds to reach
the innermost shrine at the end.
(Tagore 2004: 25)
And Kosovel in the poem Who Cannot
Speak:
You have to wade through a sea
of words to come
to your self. Then alone,
forgetting all speech,
go back to the world.
(Kosovel 2010: 66)
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