December 23, 1957 – Writer, translator and journalist Vladimir Levstik died. born on January 19, 1886 in Šmihel nad Mozirjem.
He was born into a family of teachers, Mihael (Miloš) and Neža, as the firstborn, named Ciril. In 1887, the teaching couple moved to Št. Andraž nad Polzelo due to work duties, and in 1902 to Celje, where Ciril attended the lower Slovene-German grammar school from 1896. Ciril excelled until the fourth grade, but then his poor grades, including his behavior, began. His father enrolled him in the Maribor Aloysius School in order to make him smarter, but his son left after only two years. The tradition of poor grades continued, and in 1903, his father simply kicked him out of home due to his poor grades, which also included very poor behavior.
Ciril – after 1903 Vladimir – attended the First Ljubljana Gymnasium for only a few months, after which he quarreled with his mathematics professor and demonstratively left school. He decided on a risky option for survival in the narrow Slovenian space – the role of a professional translator and writer.
Due to his extraordinary ear for languages, he learned Russian incidentally and at the age of 18 translated his first novel – Foma Gordeyev by Gorky, and then 7 more novels by 1910; including such notable works as The Humiliated and the Indignant and Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) and Madame Bovary (Flaubert).
His first poem was published in 1899 in Dom in svetu, and between 1903 and 1910 in Ljubljanski zvon and Slovan, almost 150 expressively and formally sophisticated lyrical and epic poems. Already in the first decade of the 20th century, he also succeeded with short prose. With the collection of short stories Obsojeni (The Convicts), he impressed Cankar and Župančič, and with the story Blagorodje doktor Ambrož Čander wanted to compete with Cankar's subjectivism. In 1906/7, he lived in Paris, or "Babylon of Freedom", as he called it, and became certainly one of the most broadly and European-minded Slovenian cultural figures of his time. In 1909/10, he joined Cankar's Bohemian Society, fell out with its "spiritual leader", and politically took refuge in Yugoslav nationalist radicalism. He "paid" for both with many years of social exclusion and also literary solitude. He spent the years 1915-17 as an enemy of the monarchy in internment in Mittergräbern, and in the 1930s he fell out of favor with leftists due to his membership in the extreme nationalist Orjuna. This exclusion continued after World War II, although he received the Prešeren Award for his translation (not writing) work in 1949, and Celje also honored him on his 70th birthday (1956).
Literary history identifies his best works as the story The Nest of Snakes (1918) and the psychological novel The Notes of Tina Gramontova (1919), but more modern assessments of his work differ in many ways from the traditional ones.
Regardless of his literary achievements, he is considered one of the most prolific and best Slovenian translators, as in addition to his own literary creations, he translated 62 books by 37 authors. He translated mainly from Russian, English, American and French literature.
The legacy of Vladimir Levstik is preserved by the Celje Central Library, which has a permanent exhibition about his work and life in the lobby of the Levstik Hall.
The Celje Central Library digitized all book editions of his prose works and published them in the Digital Library of Slovenia.