Slovene Modernism [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 321-336]

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personalist vitalism, moving away from its once personal perspective toward
the perspective of the community in which this vitalism is founded.
Deeply we breathe, we the tormented ones,
Creating life out of death.
Everyday they rip our fingernails out and break
our arms and legs,
and everyday we grow new arms and legs,
and none shall exterminate US.44
Here Surrealism had to come to a standstill, of course, and even more
so in the following years, which increasingly led Kocbek to political activity.
Through his public decision announcement to support the Republican
side in the Spanish civil war and his condemnation of the white terror,
he provoked an ideological split within the Catholic intelligentsia and called
its more significant faction to his side (the journal Denanje from 1939 on).
Immediately after the occupation in 1941 he joined the armed resistance
as Christian socialist and personalist. This resistance was led by the Communists, and Kocbek even took part in the leadership of the struggle for
national liberation and revolution. This led to a true testing of his new
ideological project and, in fact, here Kocbek's complex personal drama
began. On the one hand, the decision to join the fight meant for him a
great act of liberation and redemption which lent an actual ritual atmosphere to some of his partisan lyric. On the other hand, while he experienced
a personalist vision of "revolution and the holy" in the midst of the dreadful fight for his country's existence, he also experienced terrible trials and
defeats in his experience with the real cruelties of revolutionary practice.
The public became aware of this only later in his war journals (Tovarisija,
1949; Listina, 1967), and this came to light even more deeply in his war
lyric (Groza, 1963;Pentagram, 1977).
In Slovene partisan poetry, Kocbek's lyric thus has a very important
place. It is unusual, above all, because of its inner existential drama. Even
though the central experiences are ones of radical resistance, disciplined
patience and great hope, which blend rather well with the leading tendencies
of resistance poetry, his poetry is also distinct in that it reveals many underlying personal notes and situations of crisis: from uncertainty and fear
about moments of loneliness and alienation, to feelings of guilt, of nothingness, of dread and to forebodings of self-collapse and of being transformed
into a "phantom."45 He made mighty attempts to find an synthesis of
the revolutionary, the religious, and the existential ethos ("I must unify
the circles of Ptolemy and Galileo"), sometimes even successfully, but
these syntheses were never final. We continually encounter slippage into
lostness and dread. It seems that despite Kocbek's active outer concentration,