One Night in Zagorje

It is 23 February 1926. That night, exactly one hundred years ago, a young man, Srečko Kosovel, and his fellow poets performed in the new city hall in Zagorje. There was little audience, mostly workers, for whom the evening was prepared and who received the literary evening with enthusiasm. Instead of returning to Ljubljana, Srečko spent the entire night alone at the train station. Why did Srečko miss the train? Why didn’t others and where were they? The poet’s life and artistic paths are peeled and condensed into this “Zagorje night” – created as a collage of his poems and quotes from his letters – as he summarises it himself or is being reminded of it by his (fictional) interlocutors. He is, in a way, checking himself, his ideological position and artistic practices, relationships with his family and colleagues, sexual restlessness and other problems that torture him. Finally, the morning train takes him to the foggy Ljubljana – the ride into an uncertain future, of which, as we know today, unfortunately little was left. He died three months later, on 27 May, in Tomaj.

One of the leading experts on Kosovel, the writer, translator, and literary and theatre critic Aleš Berger, wrote a text that the director Neda R. Bric, the author of several productions about famous personalities (Gregorčič, Prešeren, the Rusjan brothers, Maks Fabiani …), and her team will stage on the big stage, and this will be our tribute to Kosovel, this great artist, in the year dedicated to him.  

I feel inside me a great force precisely because Death cannot rob me of anything. Absolutely nothing. It cannot discard my goals, either. If I do not announce them, somebody else will. Nothing is destroyed in the cosmos, least of all ideas. If life gave birth to them, it birthed them for life, not for death. 

_{Srečko Kosovel (From a letter to Fanica, 12 July 1925)}