Smole belonged to the so-called Critical generation, a group of talented young intellectuals, mostly from Ljubljana, who tried to challenge the rigid and repressive cultural policies of the Titoist regime in Slovenia.

Smole was not a prolific writer: he did not create a large oeuvre, but his works are nevertheless regarded as the peak of modern Slovene literature.

The stories include Mala novoletna zgodba (A Short New Year Story), Pismo iz mesteca v mesto (A Letter from a Small Town to a Big Town), Roman Gize Tikveš (Giza Tikveš's Novel), Večerni letoviščarski sprehod brez dogodka (An Uneventful Holiday Evening Strol).

One of his most important plays is Krst pri Savici (adaptation of Prešeren's epic-lyric poem The Baptism on the Savica), a paraphrase of France Prešeren's major work with the same title, in which he used the setting of the Christianisation of the predecessors of the Slovenes in the 8th century to deliver a clear yet subtle metaphor of the political conditions in Slovenia after the Second World War.

Smole's Antigone thus uses the reference to one of the greatest myths of Ancient Greek literature as a clear allusion to the contemporary Slovene political and social situation and its main concealed secret, the summary killings of 12,000 Slovenian Home Guard members in May and June 1945, perpetrated by the Communist authorities.