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Dream Visions and Other Selected Stories
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 18, 2014
Beautiful and haunting. I read this after seeing the WWI museum at Kobarid, and it expressed to me the scope of the human loss, from inner realms, which continues unabated.
August 2, 2022
Among Slovenians there is a writer considered their best, as perhaps the national writer, to the point of cliché. That writer is Ivan Cankar.
His reputation is partly due to his political life. Cankar was born into the Austro-Hungarian empire, in which Slovenia—then known as the Duchy of Carniola—was but one region, ruled by the Habsburgs from their capital in Vienna. By the end of his life it would obtain independence as part of a south Slavic nation state, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
Cankar was a public advocate for a South Slavic (Yugoslavic) nation state. He was a candidate for the Yugoslav Social Democrat Party in the 1907 elections and spent much of his free time writing, debating, and promoting the ideals of an independent Yugoslavia. A lecture he gave in 1913 even landed him in jail for 7 days.
The state detained him at the outbreak of World War I. He was held in Ljubljana castle for a short while before being drafted into the army, but served only a few weeks before being discharged for illness. Poor health continued to bedevil him until it took his life in 1918—just as the Austro-Hungarian empire fell apart.
His last book, Images From Dreams, was written during the war years: an unnamed man recounts a series of dreams, fantasies, visions, and stories; the boundaries between each are unclear. Myth, fable, war, peace, nature, beauty—all mingle freely, establishing oppositions that tug at the narrator’s conscience. He is a tormented man. He is so sometimes so oblique and abstract in his suffering that it seems directed at nothing more than existence itself—as though despair were a necessary condition for modern man.
This was a time in which all the old ways of life were being rapidly overthrown. Ancient nations, long serving their masters under divine mandates, had awoken to their slavery. Rural, oral, and traditional lifestyles were being supplanted by urban, educated, bourgeois aspirations. Religious explanations of the world fell apart in light of new scientific understandings. And with the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s heir-presumptive, Franz Ferdinand, the countries of Europe mobilised all their parts to harness these new understandings for one singular purpose: total war.
War lurks behind all of these stories, though the narrator only addresses it indirectly through omens or anecdotes. In Extinguished Lights, an old friend relates the horrors of war—both the banality of sitting in a muddy trench and the desperation and inhumanity it drove him to:
Beyond the physical threat of death and injury, war scars men permanently, though the traumas may be lurking within, unknown even to themselves. In The Wounded, the narrator suddenly sees that all the injured men around him have secretly disfigured hearts:
War transfigures men by taking them beyond the horizon of what can be explained. Cankar personifies this in the figure of Death himself, a kind of gatekeeper at the boundary of our humanity. Contact with him strips one of his sanity, as in Fear, where it is revealed how the village idiot lost his wits.
One day the idiot’s neighbour put a pumpkin on his head and jumped out at the idiot and scared him. The idiot was so frightened he saw Death, who left him a shadow of what he was. What the idiot saw can never truly be explained to the people around him. Likewise, the narrator struggles to put his suffering into words, and we never quite learn what the source of his troubles are.
The artists of Cankar’s generation also grappled with this dilemma: war is horrible, everyone agrees, but if it is so horrible that it cannot be put into words or brush-strokes, what is the point of representative art? Each sentence, each brush-stroke will only mislead; war’s true meaning will continue to elude us.
At one point the narrator declaims man’s folly in trying to explain everything:
That explains the form of these stories. Individually, they are perplexing fables that don’t seem to have full story arcs. There is confusion, but no clarity; tension, but no resolution. Regarding war, it could not be otherwise. This quality of being unfinished is punctuated by their ending in hyphens, not full stops, as though the matter were incomplete, with the image threatening to reappear in some other distorted context.
And by a slow process, they do reappear, each time with a new significance. The narrator begins to adjust to a world with war by adjusting himself to a world without explanation. Thus the same images which terrified him—wounds, skulls, stars, starvation—are re-constellated in his heart and thereby grant him a new faith in life.
In one of his dreams he walks up a hill strewn with corpses like “sheaves of wheat on a field.” He kneels down to listen to them, but hears nothing except his own despair: “The lips remained mute, unmoving; only the heavens heard their final terrifying word; the man who would hear it would hear nothing more.” (55)
Returning to the hill of corpses in Blood Brothers, he remarks how “these many pale faces that no longer see or breathe are all the same, as if a single thought had petrified in all of them in their last moment. . . “ (121) Death, which sends a man beyond the horizon of understanding, is re-imagined as a kind of gnostic release from the material world, a secret way of being that liberates us from our suffering.
Dying is also given a kind of dignity in A Special Sort of Chestnut Tree. The narrator recalls a golden chestnut tree that was always the first to fruit each Spring and the last to lose its leaves each Autumn. One day a woman dreams golden bugs are climbing its leaves. Interpreting this as a favourable sign, she digs at the roots, expecting to find some treasure. But:
A dark realisation is made: the tree gained its strength because of the nameless, numberless dead beneath it. But unlike the dead man who was flung upon for his crumbs of bread, this story valourises the nameless dead, who lurk unknown beneath the setting of the idyllic fairy-tale town. Senseless though their deaths were, the allegorical tree that is Slovenia nonetheless lives because they died.
Wounds are also transfigured in these stories. The secret injuries in The Wounded reappear in Among the Stars. The narrator lies in the grass, admiring the stars which seem to be exactly “where God had put them” (133), like an unmoving firmament. But as soon as he thinks that, they move: “I saw them clearly, as if their tiny silver feet were already touching the tops of the tallest pine trees.” (134) The stars are not perfect constants but disgraced human beings. Their faces carry the familiar marks of suffering: clotted blood, dried tears, gaunt limbs. In spite of it, they shine; in spite of it, the man’s heart beats with wonder.
In Sunday the wounds of the soldier are explicitly linked to the Passion. Because He suffered upon the cross, Christ redeemed man: “Good Friday was necessary for Easter Sunday; the death of God himself was necessary, so that the glory of resurrection would ring and sing in the humble heart of man.” (139) One could not have redemption without suffering, not happiness without despair.
If there can be redemption, the question remains how man can hope to endure and overcome his suffering long enough to obtain it. An early hint is given in Shades. The narrator, lying on a straw-bed in a barracks, tries to piece together what, exactly, is happening at this moment in history, so he can understand why he is caught up in the war:
If Death is a passion, a secret knowing that is so powerful and elusive as to give no reason to live, then our other passions—the feelings of love, of belonging, of serenity—give us even more reasons to survive.
This culminates in the most moving story in this collection, Vrzdenec. The narrator’s mother always promises to take him to her hometown, Vrzdenec. The day before they are to make the journey, he finds her sleeping in a different bed in a strange room. She complains that hers was not made right: “It burned me as if embers had been poured underneath the sheets.” (116) The narrator realizes from her erratic behaviour that she is dying. He weeps uncontrollably as his mother once more defers the trip.
Motherly love is simple and unthinking. We feel and understand its warmth long before we develop the rationality to understand it as such. But it is enough for us. He who holds onto its essence is able to outlast the suffering in his life:
The man’s life is not lived beneath biblical War, whose horse crushes and rebuilds the world under its hooves. It inhabits the places, people, impressions, and dreams of his life—things which exist before the explanation that justifies them and therefore stand apart from it. Life must remain a mystery—or it will only conduct us towards Death.
You can read this review and other writings on my blog.
His reputation is partly due to his political life. Cankar was born into the Austro-Hungarian empire, in which Slovenia—then known as the Duchy of Carniola—was but one region, ruled by the Habsburgs from their capital in Vienna. By the end of his life it would obtain independence as part of a south Slavic nation state, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
Cankar was a public advocate for a South Slavic (Yugoslavic) nation state. He was a candidate for the Yugoslav Social Democrat Party in the 1907 elections and spent much of his free time writing, debating, and promoting the ideals of an independent Yugoslavia. A lecture he gave in 1913 even landed him in jail for 7 days.
The state detained him at the outbreak of World War I. He was held in Ljubljana castle for a short while before being drafted into the army, but served only a few weeks before being discharged for illness. Poor health continued to bedevil him until it took his life in 1918—just as the Austro-Hungarian empire fell apart.
His last book, Images From Dreams, was written during the war years: an unnamed man recounts a series of dreams, fantasies, visions, and stories; the boundaries between each are unclear. Myth, fable, war, peace, nature, beauty—all mingle freely, establishing oppositions that tug at the narrator’s conscience. He is a tormented man. He is so sometimes so oblique and abstract in his suffering that it seems directed at nothing more than existence itself—as though despair were a necessary condition for modern man.
This was a time in which all the old ways of life were being rapidly overthrown. Ancient nations, long serving their masters under divine mandates, had awoken to their slavery. Rural, oral, and traditional lifestyles were being supplanted by urban, educated, bourgeois aspirations. Religious explanations of the world fell apart in light of new scientific understandings. And with the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s heir-presumptive, Franz Ferdinand, the countries of Europe mobilised all their parts to harness these new understandings for one singular purpose: total war.
War lurks behind all of these stories, though the narrator only addresses it indirectly through omens or anecdotes. In Extinguished Lights, an old friend relates the horrors of war—both the banality of sitting in a muddy trench and the desperation and inhumanity it drove him to:
We stumbled onto a pile of corpses, lying there perhaps three days. We kneeled, though not to pray for the poor souls… The backpacks were all empty, others must have beaten us to them I rummaged through the coats, the pants, and finally I felt something like a crushed piece of dry bread soaked in puddles and blood, drenched with the spirit of death. I ate it to the last crumb, the last drop. (87)
Beyond the physical threat of death and injury, war scars men permanently, though the traumas may be lurking within, unknown even to themselves. In The Wounded, the narrator suddenly sees that all the injured men around him have secretly disfigured hearts:
There was a young heart, wounded only slightly, yet wounded forever; a tiny drop of blood that looked like a black tear had congealed right in the middle of it. Many showed no wounds on the surface; they were only strangely shrivelled, worn out and loose, and their skin was not fiery red but rather opaque and smudged blue as if the blood had curdled inside of it. (72)
War transfigures men by taking them beyond the horizon of what can be explained. Cankar personifies this in the figure of Death himself, a kind of gatekeeper at the boundary of our humanity. Contact with him strips one of his sanity, as in Fear, where it is revealed how the village idiot lost his wits.
One day the idiot’s neighbour put a pumpkin on his head and jumped out at the idiot and scared him. The idiot was so frightened he saw Death, who left him a shadow of what he was. What the idiot saw can never truly be explained to the people around him. Likewise, the narrator struggles to put his suffering into words, and we never quite learn what the source of his troubles are.
The artists of Cankar’s generation also grappled with this dilemma: war is horrible, everyone agrees, but if it is so horrible that it cannot be put into words or brush-strokes, what is the point of representative art? Each sentence, each brush-stroke will only mislead; war’s true meaning will continue to elude us.
At one point the narrator declaims man’s folly in trying to explain everything:
Everything a man says in his life, from the first stuttering cries to the youthful shouting and philosophizing of the adult, to the weary sighs and groans of the old man, all of it is, I think, just a constant, clumsy, and empty attempt to say that which cannot be said, to unlock that which remains mercilessly locked until the final moment. (54)
That explains the form of these stories. Individually, they are perplexing fables that don’t seem to have full story arcs. There is confusion, but no clarity; tension, but no resolution. Regarding war, it could not be otherwise. This quality of being unfinished is punctuated by their ending in hyphens, not full stops, as though the matter were incomplete, with the image threatening to reappear in some other distorted context.
And by a slow process, they do reappear, each time with a new significance. The narrator begins to adjust to a world with war by adjusting himself to a world without explanation. Thus the same images which terrified him—wounds, skulls, stars, starvation—are re-constellated in his heart and thereby grant him a new faith in life.
In one of his dreams he walks up a hill strewn with corpses like “sheaves of wheat on a field.” He kneels down to listen to them, but hears nothing except his own despair: “The lips remained mute, unmoving; only the heavens heard their final terrifying word; the man who would hear it would hear nothing more.” (55)
Returning to the hill of corpses in Blood Brothers, he remarks how “these many pale faces that no longer see or breathe are all the same, as if a single thought had petrified in all of them in their last moment. . . “ (121) Death, which sends a man beyond the horizon of understanding, is re-imagined as a kind of gnostic release from the material world, a secret way of being that liberates us from our suffering.
Dying is also given a kind of dignity in A Special Sort of Chestnut Tree. The narrator recalls a golden chestnut tree that was always the first to fruit each Spring and the last to lose its leaves each Autumn. One day a woman dreams golden bugs are climbing its leaves. Interpreting this as a favourable sign, she digs at the roots, expecting to find some treasure. But:
Among the mighty roots that twisted and swaggered to all sides lay a pile of human skulls; dirt and mud filled the eye sockets… Other bones were scattered round so it could not be known to which skull they belonged. A shoulder touched an ankle. There were so many of these white, peaceful things desecrated by soil and worms that they could not be counted. (70)
A dark realisation is made: the tree gained its strength because of the nameless, numberless dead beneath it. But unlike the dead man who was flung upon for his crumbs of bread, this story valourises the nameless dead, who lurk unknown beneath the setting of the idyllic fairy-tale town. Senseless though their deaths were, the allegorical tree that is Slovenia nonetheless lives because they died.
Wounds are also transfigured in these stories. The secret injuries in The Wounded reappear in Among the Stars. The narrator lies in the grass, admiring the stars which seem to be exactly “where God had put them” (133), like an unmoving firmament. But as soon as he thinks that, they move: “I saw them clearly, as if their tiny silver feet were already touching the tops of the tallest pine trees.” (134) The stars are not perfect constants but disgraced human beings. Their faces carry the familiar marks of suffering: clotted blood, dried tears, gaunt limbs. In spite of it, they shine; in spite of it, the man’s heart beats with wonder.
In Sunday the wounds of the soldier are explicitly linked to the Passion. Because He suffered upon the cross, Christ redeemed man: “Good Friday was necessary for Easter Sunday; the death of God himself was necessary, so that the glory of resurrection would ring and sing in the humble heart of man.” (139) One could not have redemption without suffering, not happiness without despair.
If there can be redemption, the question remains how man can hope to endure and overcome his suffering long enough to obtain it. An early hint is given in Shades. The narrator, lying on a straw-bed in a barracks, tries to piece together what, exactly, is happening at this moment in history, so he can understand why he is caught up in the war:
He knew that Böcklin’s terrifying horseman, violent death, rides across the whole wide world. He knew that worlds are crumbling and being reborn under the hooves of the biblical horse… [Yet] his real life was elsewhere; it was in places, hopes, and memories that had no connection to this life among shadows. (58)
If Death is a passion, a secret knowing that is so powerful and elusive as to give no reason to live, then our other passions—the feelings of love, of belonging, of serenity—give us even more reasons to survive.
This culminates in the most moving story in this collection, Vrzdenec. The narrator’s mother always promises to take him to her hometown, Vrzdenec. The day before they are to make the journey, he finds her sleeping in a different bed in a strange room. She complains that hers was not made right: “It burned me as if embers had been poured underneath the sheets.” (116) The narrator realizes from her erratic behaviour that she is dying. He weeps uncontrollably as his mother once more defers the trip.
Motherly love is simple and unthinking. We feel and understand its warmth long before we develop the rationality to understand it as such. But it is enough for us. He who holds onto its essence is able to outlast the suffering in his life:
A humble light shines for him at first, a wish for something beautiful and soft that perhaps does not exist and never will. The light becomes ever brighter and kinder as despair grows more forceful and salvation draws near… I think of Vrzdenec when the cold enters my soul, when my cheeks are chilled by an anxious fear, the memory of death… Does the time approach, that sunny Sunday? Mrovec, prepare the carriage, my mother and I are riding to Vrzdenec! (118)
The man’s life is not lived beneath biblical War, whose horse crushes and rebuilds the world under its hooves. It inhabits the places, people, impressions, and dreams of his life—things which exist before the explanation that justifies them and therefore stand apart from it. Life must remain a mystery—or it will only conduct us towards Death.
You can read this review and other writings on my blog.
October 10, 2026
Es una completa maravilla. Cuanto me he podido identificar con este héroe. Un héroe en la sombra, que conoce el amor de una melodía.
March 8, 2026
Tole sem brala v srednji šoli (kostanj posebne sorte!) in dekado kasneje prelistavala med porodniško: ko ugotoviš, kako kul je lahko Cankar…
August 15, 2021
Ogledalo 2/5, Gospod stotnik 4/5, Otroci in starci 3/5, Strah 3/5, Maj 4/5, Peter Klepec 4/5, Obnemelost 2/5, Leda 2/5, Edina beseda 2/5, Sence 2/5, Veselejša pesem 4/5, Kostanj posebne sorte 2/5, Ranjenci 3/5, ''To so pa rože!'' 4/5, Tisto vprašanje 3/5, Ugasle luči 3/5, Zaklenjena kamrica 4/5, Kralj Matjaž 4/5, V poletnem soncu 3/5, Bebec Martin 4/5, Četrta postaja 3/5, Tretja ura 1/5, Vrzdenec 3/5, Pobratimi 2/5, Sraka in lastovice 3/5, Kadet Milavec 2/5, Med zvezdami 3/5, Nedelja 2/5, Velika maša 3/5, Konec 3/5
July 4, 2026
Zlo dobra knjiga za use sanjace. Taka abstraktno umetniska. Najbolj mi je bla usec Leda in Bebec Martin. Kostanj posebne sorte k ga usi obravnavamo v srednjih solah mi je bil mal brezveze. Tema sta vecinoma vojna pa smrt.
November 18, 2024
If the translation is anything to go by, then Cankar's writing is gorgeously evocative. But also depressing AF. It's almost as if he were living through, I don't know, A WORLD WAR. Anyway, one day I will read this in the original language.
June 7, 2024
jaka knjiga, kaksni odlomki so toooook lepi. mal mi je slo na zivce, ker se mi je zdel da se je na koncu vse nekak zacel stapljat in mesat ampak ay, se vedno toplo priporocam ❤️
October 25, 2025
One of the most beautiful, haunting pieces of literature I've read. This will stick with me.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews