Dominik Smole

Dominik Smole (24 August 1929 – 29 July 1992) was a Slovenian writer and playwright. Smole was born in Ljubljana in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He attended school in Ljubljana and after the end of World War II he was employed as a broadcaster at Radio Primorska (Radio Slovenian Litoral), which was set up in Ajdovščina by the Yugoslav occupation authorities of the Julian March. He later returned to Ljubljana and worked as stage director at the Slovene Youth Theatre and later at the Drama Theatre. There he met Jože Javoršek, Žarko Petan and Bojan Štih who influenced him in searching for new modes of expression in theatre.

In the mid 1950s we worked at Stage '57, an alternative theatre set up by young Slovenian artists and authors, which introduced more modern approaches to Slovene theatre. Smole belonged to the so-called Critical generation, a group of talented young intellectuals, mostly from Ljubljana, who tried to challenge the rigid and repressive cultural policies of the Titoist regime in Slovenia. After the demise of the group, which came with the imprisonment of Jože Pučnik and the suppression of the Stage '57 and the group's two literary magazines, Revija 57 and Perspektive, Smole retreated into private life. For some years he worked as a manual worker, in protest against the regime repression of free speech, but later dedicated to writing. During this time he maintained strong contacts with the dissident poet and thinker Edvard Kocbek, who strongly encouraged him to pursue his literary career.

Smole spent most of his life in Ljubljana, working as a free-lance writer most of his life. He died in Ljubljana in 1992 and is buried in the Žale cemetery.