The undergraduate thesis is conceived of as a review and analysis of the earliest poetry of the Slovenian poet, Aleš Debeljak (1961–2016). The thesis will cover the period ranging from Debeljak's literary beginnings (which, after an in-depth research, we defined as 1977, when Debeljak createn a samizdat booklet entitled Šepetanja) to the mid-1980s and the publication of his third collection of poetry Imena smrti (1985). Several studies of Debeljak's early poetry have already been written and we have relied to some degree on them. However, the analysis in the thesis is more comprehensive mainly because of the inclusion of newly avaible documents in the literary estate of Aleš Debeljak. Because of this approach, the thesis itself does not deal only with Debeljak's poetry but also with certain aspects of Debeljak's life. We attempted to track certain developments, examined and analyzed in detail, three important milestones in Debeljak's early formative years: the samizdat Šepetanja (1977), the literary debut entitled Zamenjave, zamenjave (1982), which was published as a part of Pesniški almanah mladih, and the collection Imena smrti (1985), which we believe represents a significant turning point in the history of contemporary Slovenian poetry. With this collection, Debeljak launched himself as a major Slovenian postmodern poets.
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