Jože Javoršek
[2] A complex thinker and controversial personality, Javoršek is frequently considered, together with the writer Vitomil Zupan, as the paradigmatic example of the World War II and postwar generation of Slovene intellectuals.[3] Javoršek was born as Jože Brejc in the small Lower Carniolan town of Velike Lašče, in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.During World War II, Javoršek joined the Partisan resistance, where he fought alongside the later philosopher and literary critic Dušan Pirjevec and the writer Vitomil Zupan.[7] He established close contacts with the stage directors Žarko Petan and Bojan Štih who both shared some of Javoršek's modernist and progressive esthetic views.Javoršek managed to stage several plays based on the theories of Antonin Artaud and Alfred Jarry in the Drama Theatre of Ljubljana, directed by Štih.He also published a Guide Through Ljubljana (Vodnik po Ljubljani) in which he presented the city's sights and history in the light of an ironic, philosophical and existential reflection, linking the monuments to the personal fates of the famous individuals connected with them.The epistolary novel Nevarna razmerja, a paraphrase of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos'es famous book Les Liaisons dangereuses, is written as a serial of partially authentic and partially fictitious letters between the author and several notable figures, both living and dead, among whom Vitomil Zupan, Boris Pahor, Pierre Emmanuel, Taras Kermauner, Dusan Pirjevec, and Francesco Robba.Shortly before his death in 1990, he also contributed to the monograph Histoire et littérature slovènes ("Slovenian History and Literature", published by the Centre Georges Pompidou of Paris.He also translated several important authors into Slovene, mostly from French and Serbo-Croatian, among them Corneille, Molière, Hippolyte Taine, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Anouilh, Edmond Rostand, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Meša Selimović.His dubious relationship with the establishment, as well as his sometimes extremely acrimonious attacks on the contemporary literary circles, both Slovene and French, gained him the nickname The Lonely Rider.As such, he often claimed he had the license of a court jester and loved drawing parallels between himself and the famous playwrights in history who were also theatre managers, such as Shakespeare, Molière or Carlo Goldoni.