Ivan Cankar - Personality and World View

Personality and World View

Cankar was a relatively fragile personality, both emotionally and physically, but showed an unusually strong and persistent intellectual vigour. He was a sharp thinker, who was able of poignant criticism of both his environment and himself. He was also full of paradoxes and loved irony and sarcasm. He was an unusually sentimental and somehow ecstatic nature, intensely sensitive to ethical issues. He was very introspective: his works, which are to a large extent autobiographic, became famous for the ruthless analysis of his own deeds and misdeeds.

Cankar was raised as a Roman Catholic. In his high school years, he became a typical liberal freethinker. He rejected the religious dogmas and embraced the rational explanations provided by contemporary natural and social sciences. Between 1898 and 1902, he fell under the influence of the thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche. In the writings of the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck Cankar found the idea of the existence of a world soul, with which the individual souls are connected and employed it in his own works. Already around 1903, however, he turned to an original, slightly anarchist interpretation of Marxism. His later life was marked by a gradual evolution towards orthodox Christianity, which became evident after 1910 and especially in the last year of his life. Although he never officially rejected his Roman Catholic faith, he was generally considered an agnostic, albeit sympathetic to some elements of traditional Catholic devotion.