Thirty years after the death of Alja Tkachev (1934 - 1991), actress, poet and pedagogue, a book was published by Mladinska knjiga and the Slovenian Theatre Institute (SLOGI). Actress with a pencil Selected diaries (1962-1991). The selection and transcriptions from the diaries were made by SLOGI's professional collaborators and Mladinska knjiga publishing house staff members Mihael Glavan, Ksenija Kaučič, Staša Mihelčič, Nela Malečkar (editor) and Primož Jesenko, who also contributed the accompanying text, notes and co-edited the book. The diary entries (183 volumes) in which Alja Tkachev recorded her daily events and reflections between 1962 and 1991 (she called them Tabu) are kept by SLOGI.
As Primož Jesenko wrote in the accompanying text, Alja Tkačev has entered the history of Slovenian theatre and film as a remarkable original actor, as an interpreter with a high speech culture, as a poet and puppeteer, as a translator and author of dramatic scores. She was one of the first outstanding actresses of the Youth Theatre and later one of the first actresses "on the loose", the driving force behind several theatre groups outside the institution, as well as the author of diaristic prose, which is only being fully discovered today.
In her honest and sparkling diary entries, we get to know her as a person who oscillates between moments of euphoric optimism and relentless criticism, avoiding despair with doses of caustic humour. She describes the backstage scenes of a vibrant theatre life, as well as the social spaces that were a fixture in Ljubljana in the 1970s and 1980s and no longer exist today. Exciting intimate records of an actress of many talents and a reflection on a time that is disappearing.
From the accompanying text by Primož Jesenko:
/.../ Alja Tkachev was driven by enthusiasm in all her activities, and one of her fundamental motivations was a persistent self-doubt and self-doubt, a dissatisfaction with the state of things, not feeling her own validity. She was therefore too firmly placed in life, her scepticism constantly causing her to stick out from her settled complacency. Underlying this is a very real dissociation from society, the vantage point of a creator seeking her position in the world and usually finding it through a collision with it. Her imprint on Slovenian acting (theatre and film, radio and television) is defined by the label of pioneering activity, but this pioneering after 1945 was also disorganised to a point and often highly improvisatory. This is also the source of Alja Tkachev's uncharacteristic criticism./.../
/.../ All her life more soloist than "chorister", rarely truly assimilated and "belonging", with limited possibility to apply her talents more fully. Intuitively, she has always sensed a genuine theatrical juice in the web of personal and aesthetic dynamics, and then the usual dynamics of connections and acquaintances have usually been followed by disappointment, as she has interpreted people according to her own aura. The diaries, including the filed letters and illustrations, the poems and correspondence, reinforce the realisation that no one is understood if he or she is not thorough enough about his or her foreign policy with the world, or is spontaneous in his or her candour and, like Alja, painfully honest. The depiction of the theatrical and artistic environment after 1955 and the experience of Alja Tkachev, who has always drawn her own parallel, is the transcendent aspect that makes these diaries an important contribution to the historicization and understanding of the history of the Youth Theatre, of Jurij Souček's groups, of the central and regional institutions, of the theatre of Koreodrama, of the theatre of Me and You. The completion of the mosaic of knowledge about the period of three decades and the specific intertwining of theatre with politics/ideology underlines that the basic building blocks of theatre have always been people and the relations between them, their difficulties, rivalries, jealousies, whims. /.../
/.../ Selected excerpts from Alja Tkachev's diary entries, which were created as a continuous medium of reflection, and no less as a interlocutor when this was absent, sound at times also roughly direct. On the one hand, the selection is a kind of censored version of Alja Tkachev's, which cannot be trampled by the possible scruples, prejudices and moralistic reservations of the contemporary reading public, while at the same time it captures the imprint of the 1960s, seventies and eighties in theatrical Ljubljana and the social upheavals, dilemmas and cleavages, since the entry of yoga and trendy spiritual practices, which have been a convenient medium of self-empowerment and self-healing for their followers. Alia's case shows the often questionable rootedness of these mental fixations on the border of illusion, which official medicine and its medications do not admit to, and the realistic icing on the cake is put on the cake by the X-ray image. /.../
By the Editor: Nela Malečkar and Primož Jesenko
Accompanying text: Primož Jesenko
Selection and transcripts: Mihael Glavan, Primož Jesenko, Ksenija Kaučič, Staša Mihelčič
The original manuscript is held by the Slovenian Theatre Institute
Cover page and technical layout: Matej Nemec
Cover photo Alja Tkachev as She in the show The human voice, 1958
From the media
Taboo: diary notes by Alja Tkachev, 6 July 2021, Stage, Radio Slovenia, Channel 3 - Ars programme
Alja Tkachev: Actress with a pencil, 28 October 2021, Eighth Day, Televizija Slovenija