Taras Kermauner

Taras Kermauner (born April 13 1930 - died June 11 2008) was a Slovene literary historian, philosopher, essayist and playwright.

Life

Taras Kermauner was born in Ljubljana as the son of the Slovene communist politician and intellectual Dušan Kermauner. His younger brother was Aleš Kermauner, a poet and avantguarde artist. Taras attended the Ljubljana Classical Lyceum and later studied philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, where he graduated in 1954.

During his college years, Kermauner started collaborating with a group of Slovene intellectuals and artists who became known as the Generation of '57. They published several magazines, such as "Revija 57" and "Perspektive", which challenged the cultural polcies of the Titoist system in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Among Kermauner's closest collaborators during this period were the playwright Dominik Smole, poet Dane Zajc, essayist and playwright Primož Kozak, literary historian Janko Kos, and sociologist and dissident Jože Pučnik.

In the 1960s, Kermauner met with the philosopher and literary theoretician Dušan Pirjevec Ahac, who strongly influenced Kermauner’s intellectual development. After the mid-1970s, Kermauner grew closer to Christianity and in the mid-1980s he converted to Roman Catholicism and left public life. He spent his last twenty years in a small village in the Kras region of the Slovene Littoral, dedicating his time to writing and study. He obtained his PhD at the University of Sarajevo in 1981 with a thesis on the plays of Ivan Cankar. He dedicated most of his later study to the development of Slovenian theatre and dramatic works, in which he looked for deeper ideological and existential elements.

He returned to public life shortly before his death in early 2008. Among other things, he publicly supported the newly founded social liberal party "Zares". He died in Ljubljana in the spring of the same year.

He was married to the writer Alenka Goljevšček. Their daughter is the poet Aksinja Kermauner. Taras Kermauner was also the father of Matjaž Hanžek, political activist, poet and Slovenian ombudsmann between 2001 and 2007.

Work

Kermauner was considered the greatest researcher and expert on Slovene drama. His life work was a series of monographs, published under the common title "Reconstruction and/or reinterpretation of Slovene drama", in which he analyzed all Slovene plays.

References

* [http://www.sta.si/en/vest.php?s=a&id=1292996 Obituary by the Slovenian Press Agency]

External links

* [http://www.kermauner.net/ Kermauner.net] . Home page. Accessed 2008-06-11.