Slovenská literatúra

5

Authors: Miloslav Vojtech

Review

11

Authors: Magdalena Bystrzak

The paper outlines one of the forms of melancholy in the literary discourse of Slovak romanticism. As regards materials, it is based on egodocuments by Mikuláš Dohnány (1824 – 1852), in particular his diaries (1850 – 1852) and correspondence (1839 – 1852), as regards research, it is focused on the conflict between the latent (melancholy) and manifested (heroic and messianic) lines of the author´s production. The antagonism between the ideal and the reality forms the basis for M. Dohnány´s life experience and it is also noticeable in his intimate diary records. The subject of the analysis is the performative and functional nature of Dohnány´s diaries, which feature so-called self-disciplining comments prompting the author to take action, to make a difference. Dohnány´s melancholy, which has several romantic characteristics (it is based on negation, inward oriented, attached to the „inner self ”), remains hidden thanks to them and is subject to the self-control mechanism as it does not correspond with the ideal of a „ brave Štúr´s follower“, which Dohnány kept trying to put into practice.

15

Authors: Eva Palkovičová

The paper focuses on Slovak prose written in the 1860s. The first part maps the social and cultural context of literary production and the state of the national emancipation process which received new impulses in the new political situation during the period of time between the end of absolutism and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867. The other part of the paper pays attention to social novellas written by Mikuláš Štefan Ferienčík (1825 – 1881), Daniel Bachát (1840 – 1906), Viliam Pauliny-Tóth (1826 – 1877) and Štefan Križan (1826 – 1894), which comply with new requirements laid down on prose, namely to entertain, to attract and to educate the bourgeois audience as well as to address their national awareness. The works of prose mentioned above feature an idyllic topos characteristic of the 19th century Slovak literary discourse. It either has a form of a „lovely place“ in a remote forest settlement which keeps the world of civilization at a distance or a „happy home“ which stays in a close contact with it. Despite certain remnants of romantic poetics, which may be disclosed in representations of an idyllic topos, the writings present a rather biedermeier-like attitude towards the reality: the ordinary is shown as a celebration or a ritual, they try to establish harmony between the idyllic place and the outer world, the community of a family or friends is depicted as a place that is a guarantee of moral values and national freedom.

22

Authors: Zuzana Cepková Feješová

The main problem investigated by the paper is the self in literature and its constructability. The research materials include selected works of Slovak poetry and the methodological background is provided by social constructivism of the German literary scientist and theoretician of communication Siegfried Schmidt. The paper focuses on the self in the processes of forming and receiving works by two Slovak contemporary experimental authors, Peter Macsovszky and Michal Habaj. It seems that their innovative and subversive strategies correspond to a certain degree with antirealistic assumptions of Schmidt´s methodology. A significant part of the experiments is played by challenging the category of the self, which is presented as a grammatical illusion, a linguistic game or virtual fiction. Reading of the texts suggests that the inner-textual self of a literary work created in a text interpretation is not always a sufficient category. In some cases it will be beneficial to look over the text, incorporate a literary phenomenon in the system of literature and a particular social and historical context and subsequently observe the behaviour of the actants who are involved in constructing the phenomena. This step makes it possible to examine the strategies which raise questions and verify the terminology of literary science.

5

Authors: Hana Lacová

Review

9

Authors: Michal Babiak

The subject of the analysis is a lesser-known study by Rudo Brtáň (1907 – 1998) about Slovak classicist Juraj Rohoň (1773 – 1831), originally from the Turiec region, who spent most of his life in Low Land. The study titled Juraj Rohoň was published by R. Brtáň in a literature and culture magazine of Yugoslavian Slovaks called Nový život/New Life in 1965, which is produced in Serbia, this is why it remained less accessible and known to a significant part of Slovak literary science. Brtáň´s paper has fundamental importance for understanding of J. Rohoň´s life and work, his findings are confronted with several recent investigations (S. Čelovský, E. Brtáňová, M. Babiak) in the study. A significant part of Brtáň´s research is focused on genealogy, where besides Rohoň´s immediate relatives he tracked other notable figures of this national revivalist, intelectual and artistic family. He also describes in more detail Rohoň´s main literary works: so-called apologias Chvála Slováků/Apotheosis of Slovaks and Palma/A Palm Tree, a collection of neoclassical poems Kratochvílne zpěvy pro mládež rolníckou/Leisure Time Songs for the Farming Youth, and also a collection of Slovak folk songs Starodávne zpěvy lidu slovenského v Uhrách/Ancient Songs of Slovak Folk in Hungary, which became a part of Kollár´s Národnie spievanky/National Songs. The works which defended Slovaks and Slavs earned Rohoň a place in Ján Kollár´s poem Slávy dcera/The Daughter of Sláva – Kollár placed him alongside other authors who had published apologias in the Slavic heaven.

10

Authors: Martin Navrátil

The goal of the paper is to explore the contribution of Rudo Brtáň´s (1907 – 1998) editorial work in completing and presenting the author profile of the Romantic poet Samo Chalupka (1812 – 1883). During his life Chalupka became the author of the only poetry book titled Spevy/Songs. The later publishers and editors made various interventions in its composition, and by adding poems published in magazines and poems from manuscripts they came to compile Chalupka´s collected works. Brtáň´s work expanded on the editorial outcomes of his predecessors, it made use of the gradually gained knowledge of Chalupka´s poetry and it alone became a resource for the future editors of Chalupka´s poetry or work (most recently in 2014 an overview of Chalupka´s production across genres was offered by Janka Pácalová in her compilation Básne a starožitnosti/Poems and Antiquities). In an effort to define Brtáň´s signifance in this chain a comparison of relevant editions of Chalupka´s work was made – Spevy/Songs published in the years 1868, 1898 and 1912, Básnické dielo/Poetic Works published in 1952 and 1973, and Básne a starožitnosti/Poems and Antiquities (2014). One of the strengths lying in Brtáň´s editorial performance was the fact that he was the last to date to have an opportunity to work with some of the authentic resources and to attempt at offering readers selected fragments of Chalupka´s poetry. The paper reveals Brtáň´s methods of researching Chalupka´s poetry, his way of making comments on and giving information about his research, and it also examines the canonical image of the poet. Mapping of the editions also shows that an editorial presentation of the poet implies an editorial interpretation of his work and putting emphasis on certain features of his work at the expense of others.

16

Authors: Erika Brtáňová

The paper is dedicated to the literary historical legacy of the slavist Rudo Brtáň (1907 – 1998). It is inspired by Brtáň´s research on Slovak-language Low-land literature, in particular the chapter Literature and Culture of Slovak Protestants in Sarvaš (1722 – 1918), which comes from the yet unpublished manuscript titled Slovak-language Low-land Literature until 1918. The paper focuses on the work of Michal Markovič Sr. (1707 – 1762/4), who worked in Sarvaš (present-day Hungary) as a Slovak evangelical priest. The analysis deals with Markovič´s collection of poems called Duchovní zrcadlo ženského pohlaví z Písem svatých představené/The Spiritual Mirror of the Female Sex presented in the Holy Scriptures, printed probably in Bratislava in 1783. The method of the text analysis is supported by the theoretical assumptions of the Czech literary historian Eduard Petrů, who saw the basis for the interpretation of a literary work in revealing the interpretation core. The goal is to identify the author´s intention encoded in the genesis of Markovič´s collection, and to decode the reader´s interpretation of that time. Markovič wrote the collection in order to stimulate moral attitudes of the whole evangelical community, not only the women´s. He composed it with the intention to support the Bible self-study motivating the readers with the inserted biblical coordinates as well as narratives reduced to several poetic lines. The contribution of the analysis can be seen in classifying the genre of the collection as a collection of epigram-like poems. These findings confirm the influence of ancient and renaissance literature on Slovak literary production written in the local vernacular in the mid-18th century.

2

Authors: Erika Brtáňová

From academic life

3

Authors: Vladimíra Mravcová

From academic life

4

Authors: Miriam Ambrúžová Poriezová

Review

6

Authors: Judit Görözdi

The paper reflects on Rudolf Chmel´s activities in the area of the comparative Hungarian studies and the Slovak – Hungarian literary relations based on his books Literatúry v kontaktoch/Literatures in Contacts (1972), Literárne vzťahy slovensko-maďarské/ The Slovak-Hungarian Literary Relations (1973), Paralely a konfrontácie/Parallels and Confrontations (1986). It sees them within the framework of structuralist literary scientific concepts with a synthesizing ambition, which understand the binary contacts as a part of interliterary syntheses of world literature. It takes a closer look at the phenomena that were described by Rudolf Chmel in his comparative works: bilateralness, the role of reception with special regard to fake reception.

11

Authors: Ivica Hajdučeková

In the study, the author verifies two different interpretations of the poem Dar (The Gift) (1926) by Maša Haľamová (1908 – 1995) based on the inheritance of the poet stored in the Literary Archive of The Slovak National Library in Martin (an unprocessed fund). In the process of contextualization, she reconstructs the personal history of the poet through correspondence, press excerpts, personal documents and specialized literature and uncovers both her creative beginnings and the genesis of the emblematic poem in her emotional mishaps. While when published for the first time, the poem contained also a dedication, in the manuscript form of the collection The Gift and its debut printed version, the dedication was missing in the subtitle. Although the initials lead to the literary critic Andrej Kostolný, direct (autoreferential) evidence that the dedication of the poem belonged to him is absent, on the contrary, it is possible to conclude from the correspondence analysed in detail that it was added only on purpose and “additionally”, while the impulse for the one-time indication of the initials remained unexplained. However, the archival research confirmed one of the interpretations, namely based on the commentary of the author herself in the radio programme from 1967, stating that the poem in question was a love confession to her lover. With respect to the interpretation, it has been confirmed that revealing of the relationship of the text and its context for the research purposes also by means of the archival research is productive. It allows to reconstruct the genetic links, verify and confirm the analytical-interpretative conclusions in the process of exegesis, thus achieving certain level of exactitude.

16

Authors: Ivana Taranenková

The study focuses on the work of Slovak writer Ladislav Nádaši Jégé (1844 – 1940) who published his writings in the 1880s but then broke off his literary carrier until the 1920s. As a young aspiring author, Nádaši showed an exceptional overview of the West European literature and culture that was rare among his contemporaries oriented towards Russian literature. Contemporaneous literary critics as well as later Slovak literary historians saw a link between Jégé´s writing of the 1920s and 1930s and the naturalism of Emile Zola. They arrived at this conclusion because of an article about Zola, which Nádaši published in 1891, in which he had argued against the widespread image of the French writer in Slovak cultural circles. Slovak intellectuals of the last decades of the19th Century regarded Zola and his literary method of naturalism as amoral and vulgar. This study explores broader links of Ladislav Nádaši Jégé’s literary texts with the tradition of European literature and culture that cannot be reduced to the influence of a single poetics or author. In 1889, Nádaši published the novelette Výhody spoločenského života (The Benefits of Social Life), a satirical work with the subtitle “Another Story without a Hero”, in reference to the novel Vanity Fair by English writer William Makepeace Thackeray. Several elements of Thackeray´s novel can be identified not only in Nádaši ´s novelette but also in his later works. This aspect hasn’t been considered in earlier analyses of his texts in Slovak literary history. Jégé´s novel Cesta životom (The Journey Through Life) published in 1930 tells the story of a renegade who denies his origins to climb the social ladder of the amoral and corrupt society at the end of the 19th Century. The novel depicts the tension of national attitude in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy – the subject of many novels of 19th Century Slovak literature – from the perspective of a conformist antihero. In this novel, Nádaši Jégé also used literary archetypes as well as features of the European long literary tradition. They include elements of the picaresque novel and characters related to the literary archetypes of Falstaff and Don Juan. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his reflections on the human nature also feature occasionally.The literary works of Nádaši Jége are not just the result of his appropriation of 19th Century naturalism; they include many elements of the European cultural tradition that were not frequently present in the works of his contemporaries.

4

Authors: Ľubica Hroncová

Review

4

Authors: Anna Bukovinová

Review

8

Authors: Peter Darovec

This paper characterizes Vladimír Petrík as a literary critic and a literary historian with a humanistic orientation. Petrík´s all-life interest in literature is predominantly seen here as an interest in the human who produces literature and who it is meant for. This is also why Petrík preferred human reader´s empathy to a strict scientific methodology in order to approach literature. The study searches for such manifestations of Petrík´s humanocentric conception of literature, especially for those in his book of memoir dialogues with Vladimír Barborík, which was published under the title of Hľadanie minulého času/In Search of the Past Time. In that book Petrík authentically depicts literature, men of letters and literary life of his times and that way also speaks indirectly of himself, especially as a perceptive, well-wishing as well as gently ironic observer of the literary world.

9

Authors: Róbert Kiss Szemán

This paper deals with a specific genre in Kollár’s work, namely the travelogue entitled Journey to Northern Italy (1843), which is an integral piece of central European travelogues of the 19th century. The study focuses on the analysis of the first stretch of the writer´s journey to the territory of the Hungarian Kingdom, specifically on the description of the area Zalavár/Mosaburg which belongs to the well-known early medieval settlements of the Cyril and Methodius era. On the one hand, the author’s focus is on the method of the space organization of the mentioned travelogue rooted in the Baroque era (first of all the phenomena as enfilade or central organization of the space). On the other hand, the author pays attention to Kollár’s efforts to create a modern Slavic cultural space from the old one as well as to the writer´s endeavour to set the Slavic cultural space free from the Hungarian captivity.

19

Authors: Alice Jedličková

The paper prompted by the discussion on the apprehension of ordinary folk and folk character in the 19th century stems from long-term research into narrative techniques of fiction written in the period of time in question. Its central categories include the relation between the architext of folk experience narration and other folk genres to their literary applications, as well as stylization of a skaz-like folk narrator. Such narrator typically identifies her- or himself as homodiegetic, however, she enjoys a higher degree of authority (especially omniscience) than plausible in her position. This may be explained by the author´s need to keep the plot attractive for any kind of audience. On the other hand, alternating the mode of the folk narrator and sophisticated literary techniques points to the effort to address the well-read audience. Based on the comparison of typical examples from the production of three authors (Karolina Světlá, Leopold Hansmann and Vítězslav Hálek), the communication intentions of such narrators and their attitude to the assumed audience can be conceptualized, respectively, as integration, togetherness and confrontation.

2

Authors: Marek Debnár

Scientic LIfe

3

Authors: Nora Nagyová

Review

11

Authors: Zornitza Kazalarska

The paper deals with the latest literature concerning the concepts of poetics and event. The searches conducted by the author are based on Petrer Zajac´s conceptual reflexion on new poetics, which is understood by him as poetics of text and poetics of event. In recent German (and partly also Czech) publications Kazalarska is seeking impulses for further development of theoretical background which would make it possible to grasp interconnections between poetics of text and poetics of event and track the points of transition between them as well as their potential overlaps and entanglements. The first part of the paper shows the current use of the conceptual dimensions of poetics, which is related to both the process of developing literary science into a cultural science and the process of establishing the concept of performativity. A comparably big „boom“ can then be recognized in case of poetics of event, which has been closely examined by literary science lately. The other part of the paper is focused on the question asking to what extent it is possible to talk about „eventness“ on the level of a literary text. What becomes the centre of attention is the materiality of writing, which belongs to the newest fields of poetics and which fulfils its poetic potential exactly on the interface between poetics of text and poetics of event and oscillates between the two types of poetics. The subject of the final thought is the literary historical place and poetological significance of the materiality of writing within Slovak literature after 1945.

13

Authors: Zornitza Kazalarska

Interview

15

Authors: Daniel Domorák

The goal of the paper is to use a particular piece of writing by Leopold Lahola in order to describe the principles of existential poetics seen in a wider sense, as opposed to the literary historical concept of existentialism. In the first part of the paper, what is pointed out is the key, nodal points of literary historical reflection on the works by Leopold Lahola, which were from the start linked with the poetics of French existentialism. Later, in the 1960s the opinion was reviewed through the optics of humanism, mainly functioning within the political background of the times. The research conducted in the period of the last two decades, however, shows how problematic these interpretations are. The hypothesis of the paper based on knowing the assumptions of philosophy of existence seen in a wider sense and intuitive reading of Leopold Lahola´s writings lies in interpretation of poetics present in the writings using the key of existential imagination, and the absence of this in the history of reflection on the author´s works is the reason why their aesthetic impact is not exactly understood. In order to understand the concept of existential poetics as much as possible, the analysis uses the only short piece of writing by Leopold Lahola titled Vtáči spev/ Birdsong, which makes it possible to deal with literariness of the selected type on the fundamental level and to understand it likewise.