The writer and politician Ivan Tavčar (Poljane nr Škofja Loka 1851 – Ljubljana 1923) was born into a peasant family, schooled at the Ljubljana Gymnasium, and studied law in Vienna. After his graduation in 1875, he worked with various lawyers and established his own practice in 1884.

A leading politician of the liberal-bourgeois camp, he opposed both German cultural hegemonism and Slovenian clericalism. In Ljubljana he became a member of the city council in 1884, in 1909 was elected the vice-mayor, and from 1911 until 1921 served as the city’s mayor. He was among the founders of a municipal savings bank and credit bank, and supported various societies or establishments that bolstered Slovenian nationality (e.g. the Ljubljana Dramatic Society, National Reading Room, and the Slovenian Literary Society). He was also a member of the Carniolan regional council (Krainer Landtag) and, from 1901 to 1907, a member of the Austro-Hungarian State Parliament. At the end of WW I, after the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, he joined the first Slovenian national government as commissioner for nutrition. He also sat in the first constitutional assembly of the fledgeling Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians.

Tavčar’s early literary work differs from his contemporaries’ in its aristocratic, rather than rustic setting. In it, he expresses the idea of love as a tragic motive power of human life. His early novellas (Dona Klara, 1871-72, Madama Amalija, 1875) and historical tales (Vita vitae meae, 1883, Grajski pisar, “The Castle Scribe”, 1889) were in a belated Romantic vein. Influenced by contemporary developments in Slovenian literature and by his own social and political success, he turned towards Realism (the novella cycles Med gorami, “Amongst the Mountains”, 1876-88 and V Zali, “In Zala”, 1894). After his anti-clerical dystopian satire 4000 (1891), he returned to the historical genre with his “novel-chronicle” Izza kongresa (“Behind the Congress”, 1905-08), presenting the 1821 Congress of Laibach, which reshaped post-Napoleonic Europe. His best literary works are the idyllic tale Cvetje v jeseni (“Blossoms in Autumn”, 1917) and the novel Visoška kronika (“The Visoko Cronicle”, 1919). The former stresses the city-land opposition through the tragic love between an elderly townsman and a peasant girl, the latter, about the fictional history of a rural estate in Visoko, foregrounds fatal determinism, love stories, and destructive greed.