Prežihov Voranc

Prežihov Voranc (10 August 1893 – 18 February 1950) was the pen name of Lovro Kuhar, a Slovene writer and communist political activist.Voranc's literary reputation was established during the 1930s with a series of Slovene novels and short stories in the social realist style, notable for their depictions of poverty in rural and industrial areas of Slovenia.In 1909, Voranc's first published work appeared in the Slovene magazine Domači Prijatelj, edited by the writer Zofka Kveder.Between 1911 and 1912, Voranc spent time in Trieste where he became more political aware writing of the travails of social misfits and unemployed drifters for the Social-Democrat newspaper Zarja."[3] In 1930 his political activism and Communist sympathies resulted in a threat of arrest and Voranc absented himself from Carinthia and moved to Vienna and from there, Prague in 1931 and hence to Berlin in 1932.Voranc' themes of social realism quickly found favor with the new review's editors, Josip Vidmar, Fran Albreht and Ferdo Kozak.The changing socio-economic conditions of the 1930s necessitated writers who could convey social realism, who could argue and inform and represent the lives of working-class people .[3] His first story Boj na požiralniku, (in 1982 made into a film of the same title)[4] exhibits Voranc's unique style: realistic events of Slovenian life are described within the context of an impressionistic landscape.He did not join the resistance movement, but on 11 September he met clandestinely with other writers to proclaim the self-imposed "cultural silence," which prohibited publication, exhibitions, and performances by Slovene artists for the duration of the war.As a child and youth, Voranc experienced first hand the back-breaking drudgery of farming steep mountain slopes, and the theme of the farmer fighting the unyielding soil is recurrent in much of his writing.