Bojan Štih

Bojan Štih (18 February 1923 - 14 October 1986), was a Slovene literary critic, stage director and essayist. He was one of the most influential figures in the modern Slovene theatre after 1945.

Štih was born in Ljubljana, where he attended the prestigious Bežigrad Grammar School. During World War Two, he collaborated with the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People. In 1942, he was arrested by the Italian Fascist occupation authorities and sent to the concentration camp in Gonars. At the end of Augist 1942, he escaped from the camp along with a group of Slovene Communist actvists, among whom was also the famous partisan leader Franc Ravbar and the Boris Kraigher, the later Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Štih joined the Slovene partisan resistance active in the Julian March.

After the end of the war in 1945, he worked as a journalist and editor. In 1957, he graduated from history at the University of Ljubljana. The same year, he started working as a director in the Drama theatre in Ljubljana, where he work together with the playwright and author Jože Javoršek. In the 1960s, he worked in virtually all of the most theatres in Slovenia, where he introduced contemporary western trends. He was also a prolific essayist.

He died in Ljubljana in 1986 and is buried in the Žale cemetery. A street in the Bežigrad district of Ljubljana was named after him in less than five years from his death.

His was the uncle of Barbara Brezigar, Slovene jurist and politician and current Chief Public Prosecutor of the Republic of Slovenia.

Sources

*Jože Pogačnik, "Bojan Štih" in "Slovenska misel: eseji o slovenstvu" (Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, 1987), 470-71.