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 20^th-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.[5]

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)

References

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Brennan, Timothy (2002) ‘Postcolonial Studies between the European Wars: An Intellectual History.’ In: Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 185–203.

Clarke, John, James (1997) Oriental Enlightenment; The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge.

Djurić, Dubravka (2003) ‘Radical Poetic Practices: Concrete and Visual Poetry in the Avant-garde and Neo-avant-garde’. In Impossible Histories; Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković Šuvaković, eds. Cambridge (Massachusetts): The MIT Press. Pp. 64-95.

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