Slovenská literatúra

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brought about by the postmodern handling of historical figures can be observed on the permanent questioning of historical documents in confrontation with the literary (or artistic) interpretation of events.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.