Taras Kermauner was a Slovenia

Slovenia

Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...

n literary historian, critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

, philosopher, essayist, playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

 and translator.

Life

Taras Kermauner was born in Ljubljana

Ljubljana

Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia and its largest city. It is the centre of the City Municipality of Ljubljana. It is located in the centre of the country in the Ljubljana Basin, and is a mid-sized city of some 270,000 inhabitants...

 as the son of the Slovene communist politician and intellectual Dušan Kermauner. His younger brother was Aleš Kermauner, a poet and avantguarde artist. Taras attended the Ljubljana Classical Lyceum and later studied philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 at the University of Ljubljana

University of Ljubljana

The University of Ljubljana is the oldest and largest university in Slovenia. With 64,000 enrolled graduate and postgraduate students, it is among the largest universities in Europe.-Beginnings:...

, where he graduated in 1954. Between 1957 and 1958 he studied in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 under the supervision of Henri Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for his work on dialectics, Marxism, everyday life, cities, and space.-Biography:...

.

During his college years, Kermauner started collaborating with a group of Slovene intellectuals and artists who became known as the Critical generation. They published several magazines, such as Revija 57 and Perspektive, which challenged the cultural policies of the Titoist system in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia

Socialist Republic of Slovenia

The Socialist Republic of Slovenia was a socialist state that was a constituent country of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1943 until 1990...

. Among Kermauner's closest collaborators during this period were the writer and playwright Dominik Smole

Dominik Smole

Dominik Smole was a Slovenian writer and playwright.-Biography:Smole was born in Ljubljana in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia...

, poet Dane Zajc

Dane Zajc

Dane Zajc was a Slovenian poet and playwright. He served as president of the Slovene Writers' Association , and was awarded the prestigious Prešeren Award for lifetime achievement...

, essayist and playwright Primož Kozak

Primož Kozak

Primož Kozak was a Slovenian playwright and essayist. He was, together with Dominik Smole, Dane Zajc and Taras Kermauner, the most visible representative of the so-called Critical generation, a group of Slovenian authors and intellectuals that reflected on the paradoxes of the Communist regime,...

, literary historian Janko Kos

Janko Kos

Janko Kos is a Slovenian literary historian, theoretician and critic.He was born in Ljubljana in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as the son of the painter and sculptor Tine Kos...

, and sociologist and dissident Jože Pučnik

Jože Pucnik

Jože Pučnik was a Slovenian public intellectual, sociologist and politician. During the Communist regime of Josip Broz Tito, Pučnik was one of the most outspoken Slovenian critics of dictatorship and lack of civil liberties in former Yugoslavia. He was imprisoned for a total of 7 years, and later...

.

In the early 1960s, Kermauner started a long personal friendship with philosopher and literary theoretician Dušan Pirjevec

Dušan Pirjevec

Dušan Pirjevec, known by his battle name Ahac , was a Slovenian resistance fighter, literary historian and philosopher...

, who strongly influenced Kermauner's intellectual development. After the mid-1970s, Kermauner grew closer to Christianity

Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

 and in the mid-1980s he converted to Roman Catholicism and left public life. He spent his last twenty years in a small village in the Kras

Kras

Karst ; also known as the Karst Plateau, is a limestone borderline plateau region extending in southwestern Slovenia and northeastern Italy. It lies between the Vipava Valley, the low hills surrounding the valley, the westernmost part of the Brkini Hills, northern Istria, and the Gulf of Trieste...

 region of the Slovene Littoral, dedicating his time to writing and study. He obtained his PhD at the University of Sarajevo

University of Sarajevo

The University of Sarajevo is the first university in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was originally established in 1531 as a Madrasah or Islamic Law college, with a modern university being established and expanded on top of that in 1949. Today, with 23 faculties and around 55,000 enrolled students, it...

 in 1981 with a thesis on the plays of Ivan Cankar

Ivan Cankar

Ivan Cankar was a Slovene writer, playwright, essayist, poet and political activist. Together with Oton Župančič, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, he is considered as the beginner of modernism in Slovene literature...

. He dedicated most of his later study to the development of Slovenian theatre and dramatic works, in which he looked for deeper ideological and existential elements. During the same period, he expanded his intellectual interests to the sociological works of Raymond Aron

Raymond Aron

Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, journalist and political scientist.He is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people -- in contrast, Aron argued that in...

, Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...

 and Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...

.

He returned to public life shortly before his death in early 2008. Among other things, he publicly supported the newly founded social liberal party Zares

Zares

Zares – Social Liberals is a social-liberal political party in Slovenia. Its president is Gregor Golobič, former Secretary General of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia and former close advisor to the late Janez Drnovšek, who had previously abandoned active political involvement due to...

. He died in Ljubljana in the spring of the same year.

He was married to the writer Alenka Goljevšček. Their daughter is the poet Aksinja Kermauner. Taras Kermauner was also the father of Matjaž Hanžek, political activist, poet and Slovenian ombudsmann between 2001 and 2007.

Work

Kermauner was considered the greatest researcher and expert on Slovene drama

Drama

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...

. His life work was a series of monograph

Monograph

A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...

s, published under the common title Reconstruction and/or reinterpretation of Slovene drama, in which he analyzed all Slovene plays.

He also trandlated several works by György Lukács, and Tzvetan Todorov

Tzvetan Todorov

Tzvetan Todorov is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher. He has lived in France since 1963 with his wife Nancy Huston and their two children, writing books and essays about literary theory, thought history and culture theory....

's book The Spirit of Enlightenment.