Stanko Vuk's Stations of the Cross

Abstract

On the occasion of the centennial of the poet and writer Stanko Vuk (November 12, 1912- March 10, 1944), the article deals with his fragmentary cyclic poem "Stations of the Cross" from 1936. It is elucidated not only as a religious text, but also as a text of national defense. It was created as the poet's response to the unbearable political conditions that were at the time imposed on the Slovene Littoral and the poet himself. The poet grew up in the environment of farmers and craftsmen in Miren near Gorica (Gorizia) and was raised as a Christian and socially compassionate person. He expressed a veiled, timely political message of revolt with his modern poetics that he had created before the cyclic poem. His poetics was transformed by folkloric elements into a form and religious sentiment familiar to an ordinary person, i.e., into Stations of the Cross for "farmers and cobblers," as he characterized it.