Wolf’s Nights

Wolf's Nights
Slovenija
Vlado-Žabot-150x150
Vlado Žabot
And something beautiful came to his mind – it was white and soft silence and he thought that further on… there might have been just soft whiteness and a silent feeling of swimming upwards. Wind and frost stay below you. And the soft whiteness smothers you gradually, so that you pass away as a snow-flake … into a vast, white open palm.

Unsusucessful music student Rafael Meden, an organist and a sexton in a parish without a priest, indulges in drinking. At the same time he is more and more aware of the fact that the Catholic Church as a form of faith and spirituality is disintegrating and decaying and that he is completely helpless fighting against that. In one of the wolf’s nights when according to a pagan belief the world of the living is ruled by dark chthonic forces of evil, he is surprised by the strange arrival of one of the most prominent professors of music theory. It is exactly the professor that prevented Rafael from continuing his studies by failing him at an exam. The professor who is now very timid and humble and who smuggles along a young, according to his words, talented student, is supposed to save the parish from spiritual decay. But the young debauched student and more and more obviously heathen professor only accelerate the decay.

The novel actually speaks of the crisis of the European civilization, of erosion of Christ’s idea of the love for one’s neigbour and of the last phase of this crisis, i. e. of the wolf’s nights of the civilization when it is dominated by the demons of disintegration and decay.

Vlado Žabot is the author of a collection of short stories, tales for children and seven novels. He was awarded a number of Slovenian literary prizes and is considered by critics to be one of the most important Slovenian contemporary authors.  His novel Volčje noči (Wolf’s Nights) received the 1997 Kresnik award for best Slovenian novel. It was translated into German and Polish. His novel Pastorala (The Pastoral) was the winner of the Prešeren Fund award. It was also translated into Macedonian. The Succubus was nominated for the 2009 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Polish translation was also published that same year. In 2010 it was published in the United States (The Succubus, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). The literature of Vlado Žabot is featured in a number of international anthologies