Potrc, Ivan

Potrč, Ivan 

Born Jan. 1, 1913, in Grajena, near the city of Ptuj. Slovenian writer.

While attending the Gymnasium, Potrč joined the communist party; he was arrested for disseminating revolutionary propaganda. During World War II (1939–45) he was interned; in 1943 he escaped and joined the partisans. After the war he upheld the principles of realism and socialist humanism.

Potrč’s literary career began in the early 1930’s. His early prose is permeated with protest against property ownership; an example is the novella The Son (1937). Efforts to achieve socialist transformation in rural areas are the subject of his trilogy of plays Krefli’s Farm(l947), Lacko and Krefli (1949), and Krefli (1953). Postwar life is analyzed in the novel In the Village (1954), in such novellas as The Encounter (1963), and in the drama When Things Are Bad You Are Always Alone (1964). The short-story collections On the Other Side of the Dawn (1965) and Pitiless Life (1966) recount Potrč’s childhood impressions and his experiences as a partisan.

REFERENCES

Riabova, E.I. “K kharakteristike ‘sotsial’nogo realizma’ ν slovenskoi literature.” In the collection Formirovanie sotsialistich. realizma ν literaturakh zapadnykh i iuzhnykh slavian. Moscow, 1963.
Slodnjak, A. Slovensko slovstvo. Ljubljana, 1968. Pages 483–88.

E. I. RIABOVA