Anton Novačan

Anton Novačan (July 7 1887 – March 22 1951) was a Slovene politician, diplomat,author and playwright.

Novačan was born in modest peasant family in the village of Zadobrova near the Lower Styrian town of Celje, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He attended the prestigious First Celje Grammar School and later in the Croatian towns of Zagreb, Karlovac and Varaždin. In Croatia, he met several young poets, such as Ivan Novak and Ljubo Wiesner, with whom he established a close friendship. During this period, he also collaborated in many Croatian literary magazines. In 1908, he enrolled to the Charles University in Prague, where he studied law. Between 1910 and 1913, he spend three years travelling around Europe, spending many time in Paris, Munich and Moscow. During World War One, he was imprisioned by the Austro-Hungarian authorities as a potentially dangerous political radical. He finished his studies in 1918, and moved back to Slovenia, which had just became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

In the early 1920s, Novačan became politically active. In 1921, he founded the Slovenian section of the Agrarian Party, which already the following year became independent under the name Slovenian Republican Party with Novačan as its chairman. The party advocated the establishment of an autonomous Slovenian Free State within a confederation of South Slavic peoples, which would include Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. They opposed clericalism and social conservativism and promoted agrarian ideals based on the Catholic values of the Slovene peasant population. In the parliamentary elections of 1923, the party suffered a devastating defeat and dissolved itself soon afterwards. According to his own testimony, Novačan asked for an audience with King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, where he promised to the monarch that he would dissolve the party and became a monarchist if he were to be accepted to the diplomatic service of the Kingdom. Novačan thus became a consul in Warsaw, Brăila, Cairo, Bari and Klagenfurt.

During all this period, he continued to write prose and poems, many of which were published in the prestigious literary magazine "Ljubljanski zvon". In the late 1920s, he published his famous work, a play entitled "Herman Celjski" ("Hermann of Cilli"), based on the story of the renaissance Styrian nobleman Hermann II of Cilli, whom Novačan protraied as a Nietzschean "Übermensch" in tragic conflict with his environment.

In the 1930s, he moved to Belgrade, where he worked as a freelance writer and journalist. There, he also met many Slovenes living in the Yugoslav capital, among them the writer Vladimir Bartol, with whom he developed a close friendship, Ivan Marija Čok, leader of the Slovene and Croatian political exiles from the Julian March, and Albert Rejec, unofficial leader and ideologue of the militant anti-fascist organization TIGR. After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, he managed to escape to Jerusalem. After a short period of British internment, he joined the Yugoslav Government in exile stationed in Cairo, Egypt, where he worked as a clerk in the diplomatic office.

After the end of World War Two in 1945, he moved to Trieste, where he wrote his most important poetic work, "Peti evangelij" ("The Fifth Gospel"), a cyclus of 240 sonnets. In Trieste, he met Vladimir Bartol who tried to convince him to return to Yugoslavia. Novačan however rejected the Communist ideology of the new titoist regime and in 1948 he choose to emmigrate to Argentina with the help of Miha Krek, Ivan Ahčin and Ciril Kotnik. He settled in Buenos Aires, where he met the Slovene Roman Catholic intellectual Tine Debeljak who introduced Novačan to the local community of Slovene immigrants.

He died in the Argentine city of Posadas in 1951.

References

*Janko Kos et al., "Slovenska književnost" (Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, 1982), 244.
* [http://www.ned.univie.ac.at/lic/autor.asp?paras=/lg;5/aut_id;28011/ Literature in context: Anton Novačan]