“I find in me many forces looking for their expression and their ring. I work, I work, and work again ...” (From a letter to Marija Medved)

Karel Destovnik Kajuh was born on 13 December 1922 in Šoštanj as Karel Vasle, the first child of then unmarried Marija Vasle and a married merchant from Ljubljana.

For its size and economic importance between the World Wars, Šoštanj, a small Styrian town today, used to be an administrative centre of the whole Šaleška valley. It was connected to other parts of the country by railway built for the needs of the Vošnjak leather factory, one of the largest and most advanced leather factories in Europe of the time known among the people of Šoštanj as “lederfabrika”. In the town centre, there were a court with municipal prison, financial and tax offices, and, facing the court building, a vast park with a villa, residence of the lawyer and mayor Fran Mayer. Today, the Mayer villa serves as a cultural centre of Šoštanj, housing permanent collections of cultural heritage. In the centre of Šoštanj by the Paka river, which played a major role in the development of leather industry and divides the town into two parts, stands an ornamented house, formerly a hotel owned by the family Vasle. It was in this house that little Karli was born.

In that time, Karli's mother Marija had a relationship with a shoemaker Jože Destovnik, whom she met at a theatre group’s rehearsals. Due to the fact that Jože originated from a working-class family, Marija’s mother opposed their relationship at first. Thus, together with his mother and stepfather, Karli spent the first year of his life in Maribor and in Slovenske gorice. In 1923, Marija and Jože got married and moved in with Jože’s parents in Šoštanj. Later, when Karli’s brother Joži was born, Marija’s mother finally softened up and invited the young family to come and live with her in the Hotel Yugoslavia. As time passed, Marija’s mother let Marija and Jože manage the hotel café which they later abandoned in favour of a wholesale beer trade that they got a certificate for. On the first floor of the hotel, they even opened the first Šoštanj cinema.

Karli grew up in the difficult years after World War I that was soon to be followed by an even greater and more brutal conflict. He was a smart child who loved thumbing through books and learned to read and write very quickly. He started to go to school near the family hotel when he was not yet six years old. He was a smart, persistent and indomitable student. The school was for him not only a place of education but also a place where he could observe drastic social differences. Some of the students were well dressed and fed while others were ragged and oftentimes hungry. All this made him question the structure of the world.

The times of great historical crises, the ever growing social differences, the Germanophile character of the town where he grew up, the fact that he came from a middle-class family and was thus in an ideal position to contemplate poverty and wealth of his fellow townspeople, and the stories of his grandfather Destovnik, an exhausted factory worker – all these circumstances helped shape Karel Destovnik Kajuh into a sensitive and empathic person willing to actively intervene in the state of things in order to make society more just. 

After finishing 5th grade and not yet being eleven years old, Karel Destovnik Kajuh, an excellent and curious student, was enrolled in the First Gymnasium in Celje that unofficially bears his name to this day. In that time, Kajuh was once more deeply touched by the plight of ordinary people, yet continued to believe in a possibility of a better world that was still to be created. It was then that he wrote his first verses. In his poetry, one immediately recognizes the poet’s need to speak in the name of the oppressed and to pronounce the words of solidarity. And when World War II broke out, this need became even stronger. So, he began addressing not only the masses but also his fellow poets. The losses of the Slovenian nation during the war were enormous and a common vision was necessary for it to survive.

Turbulent times in which the poet lived call for a special evaluation of his poetry and also his immense popularity. As Dušan Moravec rightly pointed out in his foreword to Kajuh’s poems in 1954, some of the poems are a little awkward as Kajuh was often forced to stress words differently due to his lacking ability to use rhyme and rhythm properly. However, his ardent poetic expression made signs of young Kajuh’s limited artistic ability seem less important. Some of Kajuh’s verses were recognized by literary critics as an important part of the national literary canon, while the cycle of his love poems is deemed to be his purest lyrical achievement.

Kajuh’s poems of rebellion and social criticism are honest, intertwining expressionism and social realism, which, according to Emil Cesar, does not appear grotesque as it reflects the absurdity of the time when the poems were written. Kajuh wrote in a clear and understandable manner. 

Kajuh’s poems reached their true potential in recitation. During World War II, Kajuh recited his poems for the first time just a day after he reached Baza 21 (headquarters of National Liberation Struggle). Among the listeners, his baritone voice earned him a reputation of an artist who enthuses the masses and encourages them for activism. 

Kajuh wrote his poetry under the influence of avantgarde artists such as Mayakovski, Yesenin, Blok, as well as socially engaged Czech writers such as Wolker, Hora, Novy and Halas. Before the war, he also looked for inspiration in the works of Ivan Cankar, Mile Klopčič, and Tone Seliškar.    

His verses give a sense of both unlimited sadness and unlimited joy, and, when written, they formed a rare combination of social activism and lyricism. Injustices suffered mostly by people of lower classes hurt him deeply and he spoke of them with great sensitivity.

Kajuh’s restless spirit is also reflected in the form of his poems. The forms of stanzas continuously change, as for example in the New Year’s Sonnet, in which Kajuh altered the position of tercets and quatrains. As is often the case in Slovenian, his versification is syllabotonic. He mostly used iambic and trochaic metres, but would sometimes change them for dactylic or amphibrachic ones. Free verse is very rare in his poems. He mostly used monosyllabic rhyme and was keen on intensifying the rhythm of the poems by means of anaphors, alliterations and verse repetitions. 

Under the influence of the futurist Mayakovski, Kajuh began using a verse form that is divided into parts and reminds of a staircase. In this way, he managed to give each verse, or “stair”, that could be formed by a single word, an additional emphasis. Before World War II, Kajuh regularly published his poems in magazines such as Slovenska mladina, Mlada Slovenija, Mladi Prekmurec, Naša žena, Sodobnost, and Slovenski poročevalec. During his lifetime, he lived to see the publication of only one cyclostyled collection of his poetry, and to this day only two copies of it have been preserved.