33 Facts About Ivan Cankar

Ivan Cankar is regarded as the greatest writer in Slovene, and has sometimes been compared to Franz Kafka and James Joyce.

Ivan Cankar was born in the Carniolan town of Vrhnika near Ljubljana.

Ivan Cankar was one of the many children of a poor artisan who immigrated to Bosnia shortly after Ivan's birth.

Ivan Cankar was raised by his mother, Neza Cankar nee Pivk, with whom he established a close, but ambivalent relationship.

Under Askerc's influence, Ivan Cankar rejected the sentimental post-Romantic poetry and embraced literary realism and national liberalism.

Ivan Cankar came under the influence of contemporary European literature, especially decadentism, symbolism and naturalism.

Ivan Cankar became friends with Fran Govekar, a young Slovene writer and intellectual living in Vienna, who introduced him to positivism and naturalism.

Ivan Cankar embraced spiritualism, symbolism and idealism, and later publicly broke with Fran Govekar.

Ivan Cankar was strongly influenced by the Slovene Roman Catholic priest and thinker Janez Evangelist Krek, who advocated radical social activism on a Christian basis.

Ivan Cankar nevertheless continued to oppose the clericalism and conservativism of Austrian Christian socialists in general and Krek's Slovene People's Party in particular.

Ivan Cankar joined the Yugoslav Social Democratic Party, an Austro-Marxist party active in the Slovene Lands and in Istria.

Already after his electoral defeat in 1907, Ivan Cankar had started to publish numerous essays explaining his political and aesthetic views and opinions.

Ivan Cankar moved from Roznik to the center of Ljubljana, where he died in December 1918, from pneumonia, a complication of the Spanish flu pandemic which was raging at the time.

Ivan Cankar's funeral was attended by a huge crowd and highest representatives from the cultural and political life in Slovenia.

Ivan Cankar wrote around 20 books and is considered one of the primary exponents of Slovene modernist literature, alongside Oton Zupancic, Dragotin Kette and Josip Murn.

Ivan Cankar is considered one of Europe's most important fin de siecle.

Ivan Cankar published his first poems already as a teenager in the liberal literary magazine Ljubljanski zvon.

In 1899, Ivan Cankar published his first collection of poetry under the title Erotika.

Ivan Cankar was famous for his essays, most of which were published between 1907 and 1913, where he showed stylistic mastery and great irony.

Ivan Cankar's last collection of short stories, entitled Podobe iz sanj, which were published posthumously in 1920, is a magically realistic and allegorical depiction of the horrors of World War I It shows a clear move from symbolism to expressionism and it has been regarded as the finest example of Cankar's poetic prose.

Ivan Cankar was a relatively fragile personality, both emotionally and physically, but showed an unusually strong and persistent intellectual vigour.

Ivan Cankar was a sharp thinker, who was capable of poignant criticism of both his environment and himself.

Ivan Cankar was full of paradoxes and loved irony and sarcasm.

Ivan Cankar had an unusually sentimental and somehow ecstatic nature, intensely sensitive to ethical issues.

Ivan Cankar was very introspective: his works, which are to a large extent autobiographic, became famous for the ruthless analysis of his own deeds and misdeeds.

Ivan Cankar rejected the religious dogmas and embraced the rational explanations provided by contemporary natural and social sciences.

Ivan Cankar's works were widely read and Cankar was the first author in Slovene who could make a living exclusively from writing.

In 1937, the first integral collection of Ivan Cankar's work was published, edited and annotated by his cousin and conservative literary historian and critic Izidor Ivan Cankar.

Ivan Cankar is considered the father of modern Slovene theatre and has had a major influence on almost all Slovene playwrights that have come after him, starting from the expressionist theatre of the 1920s.

Many prominent Slovene thinkers reflected on Ivan Cankar's works, including Dusan Pirjevec Ahac, Milan Komar, and Slavoj Zizek.

Ivan Cankar's work has been translated into French, English, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Slovak, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian and Turkish.

Between June 1994 and January 2007, Ivan Cankar was portrayed on the 10,000 Slovenian tolar bill.

The Ivan Cankar Award was established in 2019 by the Slovenian PEN, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the University of Ljubljana.