Vitomil Zupan – dvorni dramatik revolucije?

Jurij Trajbas’s Project (Stvar Jurija Trajbasa) is a Slovenian socialist realism drama and the first dramatic text by Vitomil Zupan. It was prohibited by the Italian censor at the beginning of World War II and severely criticised after the war by the communist authorities. Between 1940 and 1948, the two milestones in the reception of this dramatic text, Vitomil Zupan wrote a number of agitkas, which won him the first ever Prešeren Prize (1947), the most prestigious Slovenian national prize for achievements in the field of culture. The reception of his first dramas and his wartime texts raises the question of the author’s poetics before 1949, when he was sentenced to prison in a rigged trial. The present paper demonstrates the consistent development of socio-critical tendencies in Zupan’s poetics spanning from Stvar Jurija Trajbasa to agitkas and his post-war dramatic texts such as Aleksander praznih rok (Alexander the Empty Handed) from 1955. The latter represents the beginnings of Slovenian existentialist drama and concludes the author’s reflection upon Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power. We can thus trace the coherent development of the author’s socio-critical drama across two decades. However, due to the author’s imprisonment and the lack of theatre performances of his texts, this drama was never able to resonate to its full extent.