Anton Novačan

Anton Novačan (July 7, 1887 – March 22, 1951) was a Slovene politician, diplomat, author, and playwright. Novačan was born in a modest peasant family in the village of Zadobrova (now part of the Lower Styrian town of Celje), in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He attended the First Celje Grammar School and later went to school in the Croatian towns of Zagreb, Karlovac, and Varaždin. In Croatia, he met several young poets, such as Ivan Novak and Ljubo Wiesner, with whom he established a close friendship. During this period, he also contributed to many Croatian literary magazines. In 1908, he enrolled at the Charles University in Prague, where he studied law. Between 1910 and 1913, he spend three years traveling around Europe, spending much time in Paris, Munich, and Moscow. During World War I, he was imprisoned by the Austro-Hungarian authorities as a potentially dangerous political radical. He finished his studies in 1918, and moved back to Slovenia, which had just became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In the early 1920s, Novačan became politically active. In 1921, he founded the Slovenian section of the Agrarian Party, which already the following year became independent under the name Slovenian Republican Party with Novačan as its chairman. The party advocated the establishment of an autonomous Slovenian Free State within a confederation of South Slavic peoples, which would include Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. They opposed clericalism and social conservativism and promoted agrarian ideals based on the Catholic values of the Slovene peasant population. In the parliamentary elections of 1923, the party suffered a devastating defeat and dissolved itself soon afterward. According to his own testimony, Novačan asked for an audience with King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, where he promised the monarch that he would dissolve the party and became a monarchist if he were accepted into the diplomatic service of the Kingdom. Novačan thus became a consul in Warsaw, Br