In the year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth Karl Destovnik – Kajuha, and just before the start of the Year of the Goat 2023, we will host the writer and former director of the Velenje library Vlada Vrbiča, who will present the biographical novel in conversation with his colleague Sam Roš A dream shot through (Liter, 2022).

The event will be enriched by violinists Inga Ulokina and a drama student at AGRFT Urban Brencic.

A librarian will talk to the author Just Rosh.

PUBLISHER ABOUT THE BOOK
Before us is a novel about the life of the poet, lover, partisan and national hero Karel Destovnik – Kajuh. In it, the author conjures up for us the time before and during the Second World War without embellishment or baroque embellishments; the reader can enter the atmosphere of that time, and the main character grows before our eyes – everything from childhood, growing up, falling in love, writing, illegal work and joining the partisans to a bitter premature end.

BUKLA REVIEW
The novel tells the story of a young poet, Karl Destovnik – Kajuh, a bright and sensitive young man with a lively desire to actively enter the world and improve it – and in the meantime, to love a girl – who is burdened by the sinister shadow of World War II. His life story is closely intertwined with social and political events from 1922 to 1944. Based on facts, letters, poems, historical materials, the preserved legacy and the insights of previous Kajuh scholars, the author has written a stunning factual novel. It does not contain Kajuh's poetry, as one might expect, and yet enthusiasm, courage, joy, love, hope, sadness, anxiety, pain and anger steam between the lines, from which poetry sprouted that still resonates. The pre-war Šoštanj with Vošnjak's leather factory, the burnt-out workers, the bright boy and his family – the Vasleti and Destovniki, the students and professors of the Celje gymnasium, the first literary successes, a wider circle of enthusiastic young writers, first love, expulsion from the Celje gymnasium, the beginning of the war, uncertainty, Gestapo imprisonment, torture and interrogations, illegality in Ljubljana, a new great love, an Italian prison, joining the partisans, working in the cultural group of the Fourteenth Division and then... a shot-down dream. On the ground is the body of a twenty-one-year-old, and in the sky is a kite, which in Destovnik's surroundings is called kajuh.