Slovenská literatúra

3

Authors: Tomáš Eštok

Holly Lewis: The politics of everybody: Feminism, queer theory, and Marxism at the intersection

4

Authors: Olha Norba

Jakub Mikulecký: Between dissent, underground, and the grey zone. Unofficial Bulgarian literature 1944 – 1989

10

Authors: Terézia Guimard

The strong emphasis that is nowadays put on interdisciplinary approaches and – after the spatial turn in social sciences and the humanities – on space have also inspired literary research of space. From the perspective of contemporary literary studies, the theory of geocriticism developed by Bertrand Westphal is inspiring for its interdisciplinarity and geocentrism. In close connection with such fields as anthropology, geography, history, or cultural studies, B. Westphal defines geocriticism as a poetics of interactions between literature and human space. The French literary scholar also studies the relationships between the fictional and real worlds of literary works and their social and geographical contexts. These in his view help shape cultural identities. The article introduces in detail the theory of geocriticism and its main premises and principles in order to inspire future research, the object of which could be the formulation of a geocritical analysis.

15

Authors: Aneta Podhradská

The two women authors Viola Fischerová (1935 – 2010) and Jaroslava Blažková (1933 – 2017) belong to the same generation, but to (seemingly?) different national literary traditions. The writers ceaselessly experience in their life and work the Central European literary and political space from which they originate. The reception of their writing – by general and professional readership – is ambiguous in both cases. Although critics often suggest that from the literary point of view, they are individually “emptied vessels” about which there is nothing more to say, contemporary perspectives and literary scholarly discussions suggest that a return to their poetics is relevant. On the basis of established literary theoretical premises and by means of parallel analysis and interpretation (which also underline distinct authenticity of their work), the paper attempts to outline those aspects of the texts that might stimulate a renewed interest in the personalities and poetics of these authors in a broader context. In this way, it tries to transcend the boundaries (literary-historical, interpretative, etc.) that have been created for various reasons.

16

Authors: Gabriela Mihlaková

The paper analyses the presence of the motifs of the body, senses and emotions, the degree of representation, functions, and meanings of somaticisms, the ways of aestheticisation of the body and the contradiction or integration of the motifs of the body and the soul in the poetic cycle Ukojenie tôní (Soothing the shadows, 1845) by Samo Vozár (1823 – 1850), a Slovak Romantic poet. Vozár’s sonnets provide ample material for exploring the somatisms involved in the creation of the image (representation, personification) of death, but also of love (both maternal and filial). Corporeal motifs are tied to the object of the lyrical statement (the dead mother) and to the subject of the lyrical statement (her son). Stylistically neutral forms of somatisms prevail. These are used both in the primary sense (naming the parts of the body) and in the figurative one – in the depiction of other phenomena of the external and internal world. They “make visible” the affective experience of the lyrical subject, abstract phenomena connected with the inner experience (the soul), which is manifested in a higher representation of somatisms, which are conventionally considered as carriers, anifestations of mental, emotional movement such as the heart, tears, or blood.

20

Authors: Martin Navrátil

The article deals with Jozef Karol Viktorin’s (1822 – 1874) input into editorial practice regarding the ways of (re)publishing older Slovak literary works. As an editor, J. Viktorin advocated for a critical approach to textual sources, researched the history of the text, collected bibliographical data of variants, applied the procedures of variant collation and explication of obscure places, and used the results of these operations to varying degrees in the creation of the accompanying apparatus of the volumes (his edition of Ján Hollý was also accompanied by a description of editorial manipulation of the text). The linguistic material of individual editions varied (the texts were in Bernolák’s Slovak, reformed Štúr’s Slovak, and Slovak deliberately preserving common elements with the Czech language). In the case of publishing living authors, the editor led constructive dialogues (Andrej Sládkovič, Jonáš Záborský) and when it came to authors who were no longer alive (J. Hollý), he consulted other literary specialists about the optimal form of interventions. The preservation of the author’s distinctive language was in tension with the intention to stabilise the Slovak language by normalising the linguistic character of published texts after the Hodža-Hattala reform. However, J. Viktorin also based his interventions on whether the element in question was important from the formal verse structure.

3

Authors: Tünde Lengyelová

Glory to the noble VII. Word of the good doctor spreads fast

5

Authors: Martin Makara

Dominik Tatarka

6

Authors: Tomáš Horváth

Jan Tlustý: Too loud an emptiness

13

Authors: Štefania Vyskočová

Ladislav Grosman wrote his fiction in Czech, not in Slovak mother tongue. The study presents language particularities of Grosman´s fiction. I summarize the possible reasons for his exophonic writing in Czech. His fiction is the authentic example of Slovak-Czech bilingualism in literature, a specific example of exophony. The author´s Czech is unique in the phonological, lexical, morphological and syntactical impact of the maternal language – Slovak. Another particularity of the language is using Jewish expressions with the following sentence explanation, and retention of Zemplin dialect lexemes. These aspects represent the multicultural phenomenon of Grosman´s work. Multiculturality is evident within the thematization of immigration. Grosman focuses on the subjective feeling of newcomers to the State of Israel, the perception of the Yom Kippur conflict, the generation gap within the Jewish community, and differences between domestic and immigrant Jews. The study represents the first attempt to map the linguistical specifics of Grosman's language. It is also an important contribution to the issue of exophony in the Slovak literature context, which has not been studied systematically yet.

18

Authors: Jaroslav Šrank

The contribution deals with the typewritten concrete poetry of the intermedia artist Milan Adamčiak (1946 – 2017), which was created in the second half of the 1960s. It focuses on two characteristic forms of concrete poetry: verbal and sentence constellations. It observes how the principle of seriality is applied to these text-image compositions. Seriality, as a key compositional and meaning-generating principle, is particularly associated with repetition and variation. In the context of verbal constellations, the article emphasizes the function of visual composition in dealing with a word extracted from linguistic syntax. In sentence constellations, it concentrates on the metacritical function of these forms, specified in the form of a critique of language as a means of communication and an instrument of power. Adamčiak’s repetitive-variation manipulation of linguistic material represents the application of visual techniques to literary creation. The contribution also points out the intermedia character of Adamčiak’s concrete poetry, highlights its parallels and connections with Czech experimental poetry, and selectively considers the socio-political circumstances of the time.

3

Authors: Fedor Matejov

Milan Hamada

3

Authors: Ivica Hajdučeková

Ján Gbúr

9

Authors: Adam Svetlík

Since the beginning of the 21st century, older-generation writers in Slovak Vojvodina literature have published novels: Viera Benková (* 1939): Stred sveta ([The centre of the world], 2006), Tri ženy, dvaja muži a ja... ([Three women, two men, and me], 2017); Víťazoslav Hronec (* 1944): Dynastia Beňovských ([The Benyovszky dynasty], 2020); Zlatko Benka (* 1951): Deväť prsteňov ([Nine rings], 2005); Martin Prebudila (* 1960): No tak, usmej sa... ([Come on, smile...], 2012). In these novels, they largely synthesized their previous prose and overall literary work. A common feature in all the mentioned novels is the use of (neo)modernist, postmodern, and (neo)realistic narrative techniques and strategies in their composition, the influence of the author’s own poetry on their prose, and bilingualism in the case of two authors (V. Hronec, Z. Benka), where the work was written in Serbian and subsequently translated into Slovak. The aim of the contribution is to demonstrate how and to what extent the novelistic work of selected Slovak Vojvodina writers engages with current trends in literary transformations in Slovak, Serbian, and global literature.

13

Authors: Erika Brtáňová

In the “lowland” environment, within the territory of present-day Serbian Vojvodina, remarkable literary texts associated with the contemporary funeral culture emerged in the 19th century. The first example is the mourning poem by Juraj Rohoň (1773 – 1831), which he wrote during his time in Hložany and delivered at the funeral of Senior Ondrej Stehla in February 1818. This manuscript composition is evidence of an elegiac genre adapted to the church environment, characterized by classicist elevation and imagery. The first collection of funeral speeches composed by Slovak Evangelical preacher Ján Kutlík senior (1806 – 1890), published as Pohřebník aneb Kázně a řečí pohřební ([The mourner or Funeral sermons and speeches], 1852), was also written in Vojvodina. Kutlík worked as a teacher and later a preacher in Stara Pazova, where he likely began conceptualising his first funeral speeches, which became the basis for the collection he published in Sarvaš. In his model speeches addressed to young preachers, he emphasises spiritual counselling and consolation for the bereaved. Through presented insights into education, enlightenment, patriotism, and the composition of sermons, Kutlík’s preaching shares many commonalities with the preaching of Ján Kollár.

15

Authors: Ana Marić

This study focuses on Slovak Vojvodina drama in the last decade of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, with an emphasis on the theme of emigration as one of the important topics in current dramatic production in Serbia. It analyses dramatic texts from the collections Nová slovenská vojvodinská dráma ([New Slovak Vojvodina drama], 2004, 2014) and the journal Nový život written by Slovak author Ľubomír Šárik, Slovak Vojvodina author Jan Hrubík, and playwright Vladislava Fekete, originally from Vojvodina but living in Slovakia. The authors in these dramas respond to the complex socio-political situation in Yugoslavia, particularly Serbia, in the 1990s and its subsequent impacts on the following decades, including the prominent issue of Slovak emigration from Serbia. The portrayal of the thematic and motivational layer of emigration varies in value depending on the creative potential of the author and their contextual placement. It ranges from unique dramatic story backgrounds (Ľ. Šárik, J. Hrubík) to the existentially heightened description of the immigrant’s border situation, including those from the Slovak enclave in Serbia (V. Fekete). This research opens up space for a more active intercultural dialogue between Slovak, Slovak Vojvodina, and Serbian drama.

17

Authors: Zuzana Čížiková

Even though the historical narrative of the (mythical) migration of Slovaks to the Vojvodina (the so called Dolná zem – “Low Land”) and the founding of a new home is based on historical facts, it contains a range of relatively stable elements of a transnationally shared myth of the search for a promised land. This myth represents one of the key memories of the Slovak minority in Serbia, shaped and maintained across time, which contributed to the creation of national unity, a distinct image, and a specific Slovak identity. The paper primarily examines qualitatively varying literary texts in Vojvodina Slovak literature of the 20th century in which this myth and related thematic and expressive means dominate. These thematic and motivic paradigms include motifs of migration, flatland, land, building a house, ancestors, and others, often portrayed in comparison to what things were like in the old homeland. These, through systematic repetition in many works of fiction and non-fiction, contributed to the construction of the myth of the promised land and the finding of a second homeland which became part of the collective memory of Vojvodina Slovaks. In this sense, one can also speak of the historical and cultural memory of the Vojvodina Slovak ethnic group and the building of a distinctive Vojvodina – “Lowland” – Slovak identity.

4

Authors: Mária Šibalová

Humanist Ondrej Rochotský. Life and work

4

Authors: Martina Kubealáková

Martina Petríková: Death and existential insecurity in Slovak pre-art literature for children and youth

9

Authors: Michal Babiak

The poet, national revivalist, folk songs collector, and evangelical pastor Juraj Rohoň (1773 – 1831) was active among Slovaks inhabiting the area of today’s Serbian Vojvodina from 1795 until his death. His literary activity can be reflected in several ways: he was a poet in the Classicist style, author of texts aimed at defending and highlighting the contribution of Slovaks to the social and national life in Hungary, and he also made a significant contribution to the collecting of Slovak folk songs for Ján Kollár’s project Národnie spievanky [National songs]. In all of Rohoň’s works one can find echoes of Enlightenment views and 18th century Enlightenment philosophy. The article analyses the relationship between the impulses of Enlightenment ideas and the literary works in which these impulses resonate and points to the overlap of the tendencies in question towards pre-Romanticism, focusing on works that highlight the category of the nation and also on the question of the historical development and presence of Slovaks/Slavs in history.

12

Authors: Oleksander Boron´

By analyzing literary works, correspondence and other materials of the members of the secret political organization in Kyiv "Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood", it became evident that the members were acquainted with the literary and scholarly works of Ján Kollár, Pavol Jozef Šafárik, Václav Hanka and Ľudovít Štúr. Thanks to the use of biographical and, to a lesser extent, bibliographical methods, it was possible to make several clarifications about the familiarity of the members of the Brotherhood with this or that publication, in particular, about one book that V. Hanka sent to M. Hulak. The article clarified a circle of people from whom the members of the organization could get information about Slovak and Czech figures. The considered material constitutes a reliable factual basis for further reconstruction of the echo of the views of Slovak and Czech leaders in the ideology of the Brotherhood. It is proved that Cyril and Methodius members were well aware of J. Kollar's treatise On the literary reciprocity, works of P. Šafárik in Russian translations, etc. There was also active interaction with the literary heritage of J. Kollár and V. Hanka that influenced the work of Mykola Kostomarov.

17

Authors: Martin Braxatoris

The article discusses the connections between classical rhetoric and speech act theory of John Austin and John Searle, with regard to genre and interpretive research on occasional works of early Slovak literature. It builds on the traditional aims of rhetoric and the role of the rhetorician (in the spirit of Aristotle, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, and Marcus Tullius Cicero), as well as on insights into the connections between Aristotelian kinds of rhetoric and the typology of illocutionary acts highlighted by Walter H. Beale, Emmanuelle Danblon, and Cristina Pepe. The author applies selected tools proposed by Teun A. van Dijk for research into the pragmatics of literary communication: the notion of the indirect speech act in relation to the functional syncretism of early literature and the notion of the macro-speech-act in relation to the communicative function of the literary text as a whole. The article aims at defining occasional literary works on the basis of their pragmatic function and to characterise selected genres of occasional literature (supported by older theory of poetic and rhetorical theory). Following the work of the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, the author outlines the ways in which speech act theory can be used in the interpretation of occasional literary works of Slovak literature of earlier periods.

19

Authors: Martina Péterová

From 1925 to 1932, Daniel Okáli (1903 – 1987) was the leading literary critic and theoretician in the communist-leaning intellectuals’ journal DAV. He only published one collection of poetry, Ozveny krvi a zápasov ([Echoes of blood and struggles] 1932), but in the early 1920s, he also published short fiction in student magazines and left-wing periodicals. In his prose, he employed fragmentary composition and emphasised the subject’s inner experience characterised by an exaggerated sensitivity, hypertrophy of emotion, and nervous – even pathological – irritability. In addition to the leftist tendency, his writing also reflects features of modernist and avant-garde poetics and expressionism and – despite its self-proclaimed modernity – also elements tying it to tradition. D. Okáli thus joined the group of authors of proletarian literature and circles of such left-oriented fiction writers as Ján Poničan, Andrej Sirácky, Edo Urx, Peter Jilemnický, Laco Novomeský, Jozef Zindr, Jozef Tomášik-Dumín, and Jarko Elen. The characters in their fiction and the way they portray the world deviated significantly from the proclaimed social functionality and ideology, which brings them closer to the literary expression of the young, non-communist-oriented generation of writers (representatives of the second wave of Slovak literary modernism).

4

Authors: Agnieszka Janiec-Nyitrai

Tibor Žilka – Anna Zelenková – Krisztián Benyovszky: Stereotypes and Myths. Intertextuality in Central European Imagological Reflection

14

Authors: Kateřina Piorecká

The idea of the woman writer in the Czech literary field of the first half of the 19th century was informed by the male mystifications of Czech women writers. In literary communication, their creators modelled female writers who never existed, invented their life stories and attributed to them the qualities they believed Czech women writers should possess. The first Czech circle of women patriots and writers then had to cope with this legacy. They used a variety of strategies to make their way: their debut collections of poems would refer to their fictional predecessors, they would work on the Czech encyclopaedia, combine writing with educational work, or smoke in public – the last of which was supposed to give the Czech author a George Sandian worldliness. To analyse their positions in the literary field of the first half of the 19th century, I use the term posture, which, following Alain Viala, the Swiss scholar Jérôme Meizoz understands as a unique way of taking a position in the literary field. In the context of history and language, the term posture has two dimensions: it is simultaneously defined as an act and as a discourse. On the one hand, it refers to self-representations within public discourses in literary situations, and on the other hand, it refers to the image itself given through discourse, which rhetoric refers to as ethos.

16

Authors: Jana Števlíková

The article focuses on the poetics of Margita Figuli’s (1909 – 1995) early fiction – it provides interpretation and comparison of her prose works Mámivý dúšok ([Intoxicating sip] published in 1935 in a magazine) and Pokušenie ([Temptation] published in 1934 in a magazine and in 1937 as a book). Both texts are built on the contradiction between male and female characters, their inner conflict, tension between desire (or emotion) and rational reasoning, carnality and eroticism, and the problem of distance and contact that leads to disillusionment. The composition of both novellas is enriched by the alternation of dialogical passages with narrative ones, the inclusion of dream motifs, ideas and memories as a form of escape from reality, and the use of a framing principle that makes the actual inner events fit into a recurrent and universal natural cycle. The paper attempts to identify the elements through which M. Figuli, at this stage in her career, drew on the poetics of modernism (Slovak modernism and the so-called second wave modernism) and the elements through which she anticipated the onset of naturism as a specific style that brought innovation into Slovak literary fiction at that time. In this way, the article accentuates poetological continuity in Slovak literature of the first half of the 20th century.

18

Authors: Marianna Koliová

The article compares the travelogues of Jozef Miloslav Hurban (1817 – 1888) with those written by Terézia Vansová (1857 – 1942). The author treats the texts as examples of (1) the romantic national revivalist travelogue with an ideological (national) focus (Hurban’s travelogues Cesta Slováka k bratrům slavenským na Moravě a v Čechách [The journey of a Slovak to his Slavic brothers in Moravia and Bohemia 1839] 1939, 1841; Prechádzka po považskom svete [A walk in the world of Považie] 1844) and (2) its later, programmatically much sober and down to earth variation associated with the woman’s viewpoint and entertainment function (Vansová’s prose Mrs Georgiadesová on the road. A cheerful travelogue to Prague to an ethnographic exhibition [Pani Georgiadesová na cestách. Veselý cestopis do Prahy na národopisnú výstavu] 1896 – 1897). The core of the analysis is the representation of space and the nature of movement in space. While in the Romantic travelogues, there is a tendency to highlight the immaterial spiritual principle of space and to “tone down” the physicality of the traveller himself, in Vansová’s work, the body of the characters (their hunger, thirst, and fatigue) comes programmatically to the fore and clashes with the “higher” (mostly national revivalist) motives and ideals, without, however, denying them. It is a practice that is typologically very close to the strategies of post-Romantic authors who sought to break away from the poetics of the Romantics and their epigones.

27

Authors: Jana Piroščáková

The paper is devoted to the collection of Amália Sirotková (1813 – 1892) – the oldest known Slovak woman storyteller. Part of her manuscript collection from the 1850s has been preserved thanks to the estate of Pavel Dobšinský (1828 – 1885) who prepared two of her tales for publication in his edition Prostonárodné slovenské povesti (Slovak folk tales, 1880, 1882). The preserved notebooks are probably a fragment of a larger collection, but the extent of the manuscript remains unknown. “Povesti od Amálie Sirotkovej [Tales by Amália Sirotková]” archive stored in the Literary archive of the Slovak National Library in Martin contains three notebooks by A. Sirotková and one notebook written by another person and probably unrelated to A. Sirotková’s collection. The first part of the article reflects on the question of authorship and the extent of the collection. The second part of the papee reconstructs the origin of the collection and outlines the possible ways in which the manuscript of A. Sirotková’s might have reached P. Dobšinský. The aim is not to reflect on the language, spelling, style, or genre of A. Sirotková’s tales, but on the contexts of the collection with regard to parallel manuscript sources and the way it was used by editors of fairy tale books in the 19th century. The third part of the paper deals with this issue in more detail.