Slovenská literatúra

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.

3

Authors: Nina Podmanická

Zdenka Valentová-Belićová: Images of Serbs in Slovak literature

4

Authors: Beata Hanesová

Miloslav Vojtech – Zuzana Kákošová – Dagmar Garay Kročanová: Slovak fiction of the 18th – 20th centuries – poetics, interpretation, context

15

Authors: René Bílik

The article takes a poetological approach to the thematising of everyday life and its connections with the poetics of the “effect of the real.” Methodologically, it is part of the research concept of the new poetics. On the material of a canonical text of Slovak literary realism – the novella “Neprebudený” ([The unawakened] 1886) by Martin Kukučín (1860 – 1928) –, it identifies poetological characteristics of the novella, reveals its existential parameters, and points to the place of M. Kukučín in the ironic-polemical line of modern Slovak prose. This innovative approach allows for identification in the structure of the text the tradition of the poetics of grotesque realism as conceptualised by M. M. Bakhtin on the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the literature of the European Renaissance. The identification of elements of the poetics of the grotesque in the text of the novella is based on the emphasis of this poetics on the shape/surface of the phenomena of the life world, especially the human body. Therefore, the starting point of the interpretation of the novella as outlined here is description as the basic stylistic procedure of realistic texts – the description of the character in this case. The description and subsequent interpretation of the image of the grotesque body makes it possible to identify the presence of the poetics of discrete irony as a key strategy of authorial narration in the text of the novella.

19

Authors: Martin Navrátil

The article is a continuation of the author’s paper “Jozef Felix’s theoretical contributions to textual studies” (2023) which dealt with the theoretical conception of textual studies as outlined by Jozef Felix (1913 – 1977). Complementary to it, it attempts to capture the practical utilisation of Felix’s theoretical views (the need for careful collation of sources, justification of individual editorial steps, the application of the rule of “the last hand” with regards to the selection of the source text, searching for a space between the rejection of “proofreading deposits” and the rejection of “textological purism” in the linguistic treatment of the text, etc.) in the preparation of reader editions of the Slovak literary heritage. Felix’s editorial work, through which he set textological standards, is examined in the editions of Ivan Krasko’s works in the volumes Dielo ([Works] 1954) and Lyrické dielo ([Lyrical works] 1956) and in the edition of the first volume of Jan Palárik’s Dielo v dvoch zväzkoch ([Works in two volumes] 1955) that contains Palárik’s dramatic works and essays on theatre. Felix as a practical editor seems to have been successful in fulfilling his own requirements and contributed to the limitation of arbitrary and invasive editorial interventions, yet his procedures also seem to have had unintended and unwanted consequences.

4

Authors: Irena Bilińska

Goszczyńska, Joanna: Dark Sides of Czech Literature. Carousel of modernism

7

Authors: Peter Káša

The article analyses the dramatic text by Karol Horák (b. 1943) Apokalypsa podľa Janka (Kráľa) alebo Divný Janko ([Apocalypse according to Johnny (Kráľ), or Strange Johnny], 1994). Its plot is based on the life of the key poet of Slovak Romanticism, Janko Kráľ (1822 – 1876). The play juxtaposes the traumatic experiences from the poet’s personal history (from his childhood to the old age) with the history of the young Slovak nation in wider social and political Central European relations and accentuates J. Kráľ’s individual existential drama. The analysis outlined in the article discusses the variable and dynamic relations between historical facts and dramatic fiction on which the construal of historical figures and events in the play was based. Horák’s text also introduces a change in the paradigm with respect to the conceptualisation of stabilised and stereotyped events and historical personalities. The innovation brought about by the postmodern handling of historical figures can be observed on the permanent questioning of historical documents in confrontation with the literary (or artistic) interpretation of events. The structure of the drama takes into consideration the prism of individual and national frustration and fate. The dramatic text is built on the intersections of the biological and metaphysical, real and fictitious, and verbalised (written) and sensed (mystic). Philosophical journeys into the labyrinths of individual and collective subconscious are equally an important layer of Horák’s work.

10

Authors: Katarína Beňová

The Slovak painter, photographer, and nationalist Peter Michal Bohúň (1822 – 1879) was a sought-after portraitist of his generation with good connections – especially with the Evangelical intelligentsia. One of the less researched topics with regards to his oeuvre are religious paintings commissioned for churches. The artist accepted the commissions predominantly for financial reasons. Based on the preserved materials – altar paintings he created mainly for Evangelical churches in the villages of Bátovce, Dovalovo, Krivá, Lovinobaňa, Lučivná, Mengusovce, Mládzovo, Partizánska Ľupča, and Veličná and in the town of Ružomberok –, his contribution to the development of 19th-century religious art on the territory of Slovakia can be studied. The article concentrates on P. M. Bohúň’s strategies with regards to the choice of themes for individual churches and on the communication with the parishes and Evangelical personalities of the day. As a case study, the article discusses the commission for the Evangelical church in Bátovce. Communication between the artist and the priest Pavol Gerengay (1825 – 1895) sheds light on the period strategies of commissioning altar paintings.

11

Authors: Jana Piroščáková

The article assesses the reception of the life and work of Amália Sirotková (1813 – 1892), the first known Slovak woman collector of fairy tales whose collection of tales has been preserved in manuscript form. The paper points to significant discrepancies between information on A. Sirotková and her tales published in literature and facts based on available source materials. The author rigorously analyses the conclusions of researchers who wrote about A. Sirotková (Bohumil Haluzický, 1952; Karel Horálek, 1989), information included in Ľudovít V. Rizner’s Bibliografia slovenského písomníctva ([Bibliography of Slovak literature], 1933), and the biographical entry on A. Sirotková in Slovenský biografický slovník ([Slovak biographical dictionary], 1993). The article revises the facts provided in these references in the context of the research of fairy tales in the 19th century. The aim of the article is to accentuate the necessity to work with primary sources which help avoid drawing conclusions based on nonfactual links. Such imprecisions occur especially when it comes to marginally known personalities with very few references in literature and result in a distorted literary-historical portrait which does not correspond to the facts.

16

Authors: Dana Hučková

In the context of memory studies, literary texts can be understood as media of collective memory; through selection, reconstruction, and updating of chosen topoi, images, or personalities, they perform such functions as forming the understanding of the past, transfer of historical images, construction of memory relations, or reflection of the processes and problems of collective memory. In this sense, literature forms collective images of the development and meaning of past events, eminent personalities of the past, interprets the present, and projects the future. Moreover, for an understanding the symbolic meaning of the elements for which Pierre Nora coined the term places of memory and Jan Assmann conceptualised as figures of memory, processes of reception and context are also crucial. This theoretical background also determines the approach to literary and literary-journalistic texts related to representatives of Slovak literary Romanticism born in 1822 (Ján Francisci, Janko Kráľ, Ján Kalinčiak, Ján Palárik, Štefan Marko Daxner, and Peter Michal Bohúň) and – in the case of Andrej Sládkovič, in 1820. This group formed a strong national revivalist generation whose literary representations provide all three types of collective memory identified by J. Assmann: communicative, cultural, and political.

19

Authors: Martin Navrátil

The article outlines the profile of editorial work of Jozef Felix (1913 – 1977) and aims at grasping his conceptual contribution to research in Slovak textual studies and his influence on editorial practice in the 1950s when Slovak culture paid great attention to the publishing of literary heritage. The author takes into consideration the fact that J. Felix formed his vision of textual studies strategies and aims of the discipline and editorial practice under the conditions and restrictions of the period (and in confrontation with these). The article identifies basic features of Felix’s editorial approach that – since he was an editor of the section for Slovak and Czech literature at the Slovak Publishing House of Belles-Lettres –shaped the development of editorial practice in Slovakia. Drawing on Felix’s key essays on the topic, especially on his O vydávaní klasikov ([Publishing the classics], 1953), Poznámky k vydávaniu Spisov Jána Kalinčiaka ([Notes on publishing Ján Kalinčiak’s oeuvre], 1954), and the interview Prekladať diela našich klasikov do dnešnej slovenčiny? ([Should we translate the work of our classics into Slovak?] 1957), the article scrutinises his initiatory activities regarding the conceptual consolidation of textological principles, the contradictory issues pertaining to these, and the positive and negative impact these had on subsequent editorial projects. In this way, the paper contributes towards the knowledge of the history of Slovak textual studies.