Kosmac, Ciril
Kosmač, Ciril
Born Sept. 28, 1910, in the village of Slap, Slovensko Primorje. Slovene writer.
Kosmač was incarcerated in 1929-30 in a Fascist prison in Rome for revolutionary activity; he escaped to Yugoslavia. In 1938 he went abroad to study, returning to Yugoslavia in 1944 to participate in the national liberation movement against Fascism. His prose first appeared in print in 1933. Kosmač is a master of the realistic psychological novella—for example, the collections Happiness and Bread (1946; Russian translation, 1961) and From My Valley (1958). He also wrote the screenplay for On One’s Own Soil (1949) and the novel A Spring Day (1953). In the 1950’s, Kosmač introduced some modernist elements in his work—for example, The Ballad of a Chimney and a Cloud (1956-57; Russian translation, 1970; Yugoslav film with the same title, 1961) and Tantantadrui (1959).