which are to a large extent autobiographic, became famous for the ruthless analysis of his own deeds and misdeeds. Cankar was raised as a Roman Catholic. In his high school years, he became a typical liberal freethinker. He rejected the religious dogmas and embraced the rational explanations provided by contemporary natural and social sciences. Between 1898 and 1902, he fell under the influence of the thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche. In the writings of the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck Cankar found the idea of the existence of a world soul with which the individual souls are connected, an idea he employed in his own works. Already around 1903, however, he turned to an original, slightly anarchist interpretation of Marxism. His later life was marked by a gradual evolution towards orthodox Christianity, which became evident after 1910 and especially in the last year of his life. Although he never officially rejected his Roman Catholic faith, he was generally considered agnostic, albeit sympathetic to some elements of traditional Catholic devotion. Influence Cankar was an influential author already during his lifetime. His works were widely read and Cankar was the first author in Slovene who could make a living exclusively from writing. He became even more influential after his death. Due to his insistence on the cultural and national specificity of the Slovene people, Cankar became the referential figure for the young generations of Slovene intellectuals who rejected the centralistic and unitaristic policies of the Serb political elite in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the early 1920s, a group of young Catholics, mostly of Christian Socialist convictions, took the title of one of Cankar's minor novels, Križ na gori (Cross on the Mountain), as the name of their journal. The group, known as the "Crusaders" (), became the focal point in the emergence of the Christian left in Slovenia in the 1920s and 1930s. Cankar's work and his personal world view influenced all three major literary trends in Slovene literature between 1918 and 1945: the expressionism of Catholic authors such as Ivan Pregelj, Stanko Majcen, and France Bevk, the social realism of the liberal left and Marxist authors (particularly Miško Kranjec, Prežihov Voranc, Ciril Kosmač, and Mile Klopčič) and the avantgardism of Srečko Kosovel. During the same period, Cankar's political ideas influenced the Slovene social-democratic ideologist Etbin Kristan, the Christian Democratic political theorist Andrej Gosar and the democratic thinkers Albin Prepeluh