Slovenská literatúra

4

Authors: Klára Soukupová

Jiří Koten: Poetics of the Narrative Commentary: Rhetorical Narrator in Czech Literature

8

Authors: Ján Gbúr

Although Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (1849 – 1921) is probably the most well-known classic of Slovak literature, his work has not been researched in its entire complexity. The article offers an overview of literature on his work and discusses the differences between methodologically sound scholarship – including interpretations of Hviezdoslav’s work – and superficial affirmative biographies and compositional, structuralist versological, semantic and form-centred analyses. From the comparatist point of view, it addresses his early work in Hungarian and German, but also points to his literary criticism, dramatic works, structured character of his poetics and the high artistic artifice of his depictive and expressive method. The article concludes with a set of topics and research areas which have not been sufficiently addressed and hopes to elicit more scholarly attention in them.

10

Authors: Ivana Taranenková

The study focuses on revising approaches to literary and cultural representations produced in the nineteenth century, an epoch that is an important part of cultural memory in both domestic and European contexts. It draws attention to the ambivalent nature of the persistence of the 19th Century in the present, in which there is a tension between its mediation by representations and their determining influence on the contemporary shape of cultural memory and its institutional forms. Part of their reassessment may involve not only pointing to their constructed nature, but also making visible marginalised representations that confront and carry oppositional or alternative meanings to the established ones. The study confronts two attitudes to nineteenth-century literature and culture - the subversive and the affirmative. Using the example of reflection on Victorian culture, it shows how a revising approach, a 'resisting reading', becomes a source of its actualization in the present. It also recapitulates this type of revising approaches in the context of Slovak literary historiography.

12

Authors: Zoltán Rédey

The paper focuses on paradoxical aspects of P. O. Hviezdoslav’s personality. The poet – although considered a central figure in the Slovak literary canon, institutionally accepted authority and emblem of national culture – remains “rather unpopular and basically unread” and “incomprehensible”. Slovak literary studies, especially before 1989, praised Hviezdoslav’s folk realistic orientation – especially in his “peasant themes”. This narrative foregrounded his folk realistic orientation which was supposed to make his poetry more accessible to the common reader. By means of synecdochal interpretation of fragments of his work, the author of the article shows that Hviezdoslav’s peasant themes – by their expressive, formal and genre qualities – do not display so much a folk realistic influence as the poet’s tendency towards verbal extensiveness, stylistic “exclusivity,” mannerism, Parnassism and respect for classical models. The paper focuses on how these features influence the real status and reception of Hviezdoslav’s poetry today.

17

Authors: Ján Gbúr

The article concentrates on interpreting Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav’s (1849 – 1921) ballads – the part of his oeuvre which has only been investigated marginally so far. His ballads from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (U kaplice [At the chapel], Zuzanka Hraškovie [Zuzanka Hraškovie], Anča [Anča], Margita [Margita], Studnica [The well], Smelá Katka [Daring Katka], Topeľci [Drowned], Jedlica [Fir tree], Krivoprísažník [False witness], Mladá vdova [Young widow], Matúš Stolár [Matúš Carpenter]) adapt some of the traditional themes of folk and Romantic ballads (crime and punishment, moral failure, folk customs), but also bring new motives (search for the spiritual path from pragmatic truth criteria, property disputes and unorthodox solutions to life problems, social and economic disparity and its effects). Comparison of Hviezdoslav’s ballads with those written by Slovak poets of the Romantic period Janko Kráľ and Ján Botto shows his authentic realist attitude in the handling of the genre. Hviezdoslav accentuated the epical side of the narratives, employing several means of representation (on the level of the narrator and on the level of the structure of the stanza and verse). He realised the lyrical side of the narratives, their balladic atmosphere – also through the functional structure of the verse – but primarily through expressive, lyrical depictions and commentaries.

18

Authors: Eva Palkovičová

The article is concerned with literary representations of everyday life in the novella by the Slovak author Mikuláš Štefan Ferienčík (1825 – 1881) Bratia ([Brothers] 1863). The novella critically addresses Romantic idealism which was at that time – in the 1860s – already perceived as outdated and lacking function and presents the reader with a new type of nationally conscious individual: a family-oriented middle class man, successful in his career and respected by the society. The protagonist of the novella does not understand his national identity as an abstract spiritual value, but makes it a part of everyday situations (during meals, events, in shaping family relationships). By doing so, he also helps build national awareness in other characters in the novella. M. Š. Ferienčík not only offers his readers a practical example of how to combine personal happiness with the imperative of building the national society, but also a new solution to the key problem of Slovak Romanticism – “the embracement of the spirit and matter”. The article draws on the category of everyday life as conceptualised by the American literary scholar Rita Felski. In her view, everyday life is a sphere of human activities characterised by the domestic space, cyclical time and the modality of habit.