Slovenská literatúra

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.