Ivan Krasko

(pseudonym of Ján Botto). Born July 12, 1876, in Lukovišt’a, Central Slovakia; died Mar. 3, 1958, in Piešt’ani. Slovak poet; People’s Artist of Czechoslovakia (1947). Came from a peasant background.

Krasko’s poems were strongly associated with the realistic traditions of Slovak literature, although they included some features of symbolism (the collections Night and Sorrow, 1909, and Verses, 1912). Motifs of sadness and disappointment produced by the absence of rights in bourgeois society and reflecting the mood of part of the Slovak intelligentsia on the eve of World War I were combined in Krasko’s work with patriotism, faith in the liberation of the homeland, and a call to national and social struggle (the poems “Jehovah,” “The Miners,” and “The Slave”). Krasko wrote very little after 1918.