DRAMA
Subtitle: A play in four scenes
NUMBER OF PERSONS: 15 (10 women, 2 men, 3 girls) and girls, wives and children
PLACE AND TIME OF EVENT: The location of the event is marked in the book as »every Slovenian village« during the First World War. In the text, we can find information that the setting is Šentjanž near Sevnica, where Krek stayed several times and died there in the year the play was created, and that the orphans come from the mining town of Karmela (from nearby Krmelj).
SOURCE: The first book edition was published in 1918.
John the Evangelist Krek (1865–1917) was a politician, priest, theologian, publicist and writer of numerous professional, historical, theological and literary works. He was a long-time member of the National and Provincial Assembly, and he devoted himself primarily to improving the social situation of farmers and workers. He founded associations, cooperatives, loan companies, vocational schools, consumer chains for the supply of labor, employment agencies (employment agencies), pension funds, cultural and sports associations. By economically saving the Slovenian peasant population, he influenced the reduction of emigration. In his political program, which he understood as Christian socialism, he advocated for the economic and political survival of Slovenians, which, in his opinion, depended on improving their social situation and the successful all-round organization of economic and cultural life. He supported the demand for universal and equal suffrage and emphasized the importance of education, including informal education. His most important treatises include Black beeches of the farmhouse (1895). In the work he analyzed the agriculture and economy of many countries. Krek's most extensive monograph, which consists of more than six hundred pages, is Socialism (1901). In the work, he gave his view of the history and development of socialist ideas and movements. Krek's biographers have recorded several thousand speeches and around six thousand articles, and he also wrote poems, prose, and plays.
First dramatic attempt St. Cyril and Methodius set foot on Slavic land (1885) was followed by a series of plays with exclusively male roles; the author wrote them for performance in societies that had exclusively male (or exclusively female) membership in his time: Justice has been served. (1892), Gypsy magician (1897) and Municipal drum (published 1908, written at least ten years earlier).
He later wrote the same number of plays with mixed casts: Turkish cross (1910), Three sisters (1910), drama St. Lucia (1913) and With the army (2017).
Krek did not have great literary ambitions. Most of his plays were written at the initiative of friends and members of societies for the needs of their theatrical creation. In the Slovenian Christian-Social Association, which he founded, he organized the publication of Collections of folk games, in which two of his burkas were also published. Due to the abundance of his other works, he did not attend the staging of his texts, but the information has been preserved that he participated as an actor in Slovenian amateur performances in Vienna (On the 50th anniversary of Dr. Janez Evangelista Krek, 2017, p. 49).
MAGAZINE, BOOK AND ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS
The game was first published in four issues of the weekly magazine Illustrated Messenger, which was published during the First World War and is also fully accessible in Digital Library of SloveniaIndividual paintings were published from May 23 to June 13, 1918 (No. 38-41):
Link to Illustrated Gazette, No. 38.
Link to Illustrated Gazette, No. 39.
Link to Illustrated Gazette, No. 40.
Link to Illustrated Gazette, No. 41.
In the same year, and before the end of the war, the first book edition was published. With the help of transcripts and a magazine edition – and finally a book edition – several performances were staged in various Slovenian places during the war, but later interest in Krek's play died down. New problems and turbulent events in the political, economic and cultural fields arose in the new Kingdom of SHS. Slovenians who remained outside the borders of the new state found themselves in the grip of rough assimilation. On the centenary of the "Great War", the text was republished in two more book editions, which are also presented on our website:
Link to: Pavel Golia Dobruja.
In 2014, editor and publisher Marjeta Žebovec prepared an anthology of ten dramatic works with the theme of World War I.
Literary historian Milan Dolgan republished the work at the Amaletti publishing house and added an extensive foreword in which he described the circumstances of the creation of the play, Krek's last months of life, all of his plays, and notes on Krek's work.
Crack's game With the army is also available on the Wikisource website, and the transcript of the text is from the first edition, from Illustrated Messenger → connection.
In the first painting, the girls are preparing a procession and decorating Mary's chapel. It is May, the month of flowers and awakening life, but for the third time in a while war is ravaging the country. The men have been drafted and many have already fallen, while the women and children, who suffer from deprivation, have to do all the hardest work themselves. In the second painting, a mother, who was among the participants in the procession, sees her two sons in a dream. The first is in Italian captivity, the second in Russian captivity. She then receives letters: both of them inform her that they are still alive. However, the wealthy farmer Klančevka does not share this happiness. At the beginning of the war, her husband was killed, and a year later her son also died. She no longer has the strength to cope with the hard work and despairs of life. Maruša, a beggar, intervenes in her pain, looking for a home for three orphaned girls: their father was killed at the front, and they have just lost their mother. In caring for the children, Klančevka finds new meaning. Together with Maruša and the girl Agata, she will come to life again with the girls who accept her as their new mother. The melodramatic tones of the play are also underpinned in this play by Krek with singing – from church hymns to the moving laments of prisoners of war – and verses that the author has woven into the dramatic text.