Ivan Cankar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ivan Cankar (Vrhnika, 10 May 1876- Ljubljana, 11 December 1918) was a famous Slovenian writer, playwright and poet.

The son of a village tailor, he studied electrical engineering in Vienna, and lived there for some time as a freelance writer.

He wrote around 30 books and is the primary exponent of Slovenian modernism. Cankar is one of the most important fin-de-siècle European writers, and dealt with social, national and moral themes. In Slovenia, his most famous work is the drama "Hlapci". However, his importance for the Slovenian and European literature probably lies in his symbolistic sketches and other short stories, which, in their mixture of symbolism, modernism and even expressionism, have sometimes been paralleled to Franz Kafka and James Joyce.

Despite being part of most European literary currents, his work is nevertheless very individual. Cankar influenced the thought about the Slovenian national question, and proposed the national emancipation of the Slovenians within an union of the Southern Slavic peoples. He was also active as a politician, being a member of socialist democrat party. His socialist inclination has also been an impulse for the story "Hlapec Jernej in njegova pravica" (The Servant Jernej and his Justice), which has been translated into several languages.

Tanslations of Ivan Cankar also include: Ivan Cankar, My Life and Other Sketches, Ljubljana, Društvo slovenskih pisateljev in Mladinska knjiga, 1988, and Ivan Cankar, Dream Visions and Other Selected Stories, Willoughby Hills, OH, Slovenian Research Center of America, 1982.

His hometown Vrhnika (20 km from Ljubljana) boasts a museum dedicated to him. Next to France Prešeren, Ivan Cankar is the most famous writer of Slovenia and the largest cultural centre of Slovenia (Cankarjev dom) is named after him.

The collected works of Cankar were published by Cankarjeva založba in Ljubljana.