France Bevk

Bevk, France

 

Born Sept. 17, 1890, inZakojca, inGorica (Gorizia). Slovenian writer. Member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Bevk was born into an artisan’s family. During the 1920’s and 1930’s he was persecuted for his antifascist activity. In 1943, Bevk escaped from an Italian prison and joined the partisans. He was chairman of the National Liberation Committee of the Slovenian Coastal Area and Trieste. He began publishing his work in 1906. During the 1920’s he was influenced by expressionism, but subsequently he became an outstanding representative of realism. His best writing deals with life in the Slovenian village. His creative work is distinguished by a diversity of genre. He is the author of historical novels about the Slovenian Coastal Area. In his best novel, Kaplan Martin Čedermac (1938), Bevk describes the struggle of the Slovenians for their own language and culture during the Italian Fascist occupation. Novellas such as Foreign Blood (1954) and Black Shirt (1956) deal primarily with the struggle of the Slovenian people against Italian Fascism.

WORKS

Izbrani spisi, vols. 1–7. Ljubljana, 1951–59.
In Russian translation:
Tonchek. Moscow, 1964.