Slovenská literatúra

3

Authors: Eva Palkovičová

Jana Truhlářová: The long road to understanding (Emile Zola, Gusstave Flaubert, guy de Maupassant in Slovak literature and criticism)

3

Authors: Alena Ružbaská

Art and revolution: a hundred years later Iskusstvo i revoľucija: sto let spusťa

8

Authors: Zuzana Kubusová

The novel Víťazný pád ([The victorious fall] 1929) is the last work in the first phase of the oeuvre of the Slovak writer of Czech origins, Peter Jilemnický (1901 – 1949). Literary historiography has most often discussed the novel in the context of Slovak interwar fiction primarily in relation to expressionism and the lyricisation of prose. The paper focuses on the transformation of the main character as the determining element in the development of the plot and on spatial contrasts in the novel. It identifies the plane of the material world, through which the author reflects the social tragedy of life in the Slovak region of Kysuce, and the plane of the imaginative world, represented especially by the main character Maťo Horoň. With regards to the imaginative world, the article proposes the hypothesis that the novel’s poetics has ties with the aesthetics of Czech poetism. The novel was written between 1925 and 1926, a period that witnessed an ongoing debate about the suitability of the poetic programme as blueprint for art and literature for the new society. The article views the novel as a transitional work in the development of the author’s poetics.

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Authors: Jana Šnytová, Špela Sevšek Šramel

The article presents the Slovenian poet Srečko Kosovel (1904 – 1926) in the context of his entire poetic oeuvre, from impressionism and expressionism to constructivism, in a complex understanding of time, space, and inter-literary contacts, with an emphasis on his individual poetic expression. In the analytical part of the article, we focus on the reception of translated Kosovel’s poetry in the Czech and Slovak cultural space during the 20th and 21st centuries. Through an annotated bibliographical survey of published works, we identify three phases of the reception of his poetry in Slovenia, which are also reflected in three stages of translations into Czech and Slovak language: the first one is connected to two anthologies of Slovenian poetry published during the Second World War (1940), the second one is linked to two selections of his poetry that came out in response to the new reception and perception of Kosovel in the 1970s, and the third stage concerns translations published after 2000. We analyse the reception of the poet in translation by both looking into particulars of the selection of poems and composition of individual poetry collections and close reading of selected translations and observing translation strategies of individual translators. In doing so, we draw on analyses of poems that exist in several translated versions or in translations by different translators.

35

Authors: Pavel Matejovič, Katarína Mikulovičová

The article presents an overview of Slovak literary samizdat periodicals published in the 1980s: Kontakt, Altamira, K, Fragment, Fragment K. The authors describe them, deal with their thematic focus, content structure, conditions of their emergence and general context of the period, and analyse selected texts that represent the specific poetics of literary samizdat. At the same time, it devotes space to the discussion of the Czechoslovak context of literary samizdat which cannot be separated from Slovak literary samizdat. At the same time, the article briefly outlines theoretical definitions of the concept of the literary samizdat as used in Central and Eastern European context, taking especially into account the specific character of Slovak literary samizdat. The authors draw on international research on samizdat, especially on the works of Czech literary scholars summarised in the encyclopaedic monograph Český literární samizdat 1948 – 1989 ([Czech literary samizdat 1948 – 1989] 2018). The article aims to inspire further research on Slovak literary samizdat.

3

Authors: Terézia Guimard

Nagy, Ladislav: From romance to the novel and back

4

Authors: Martina Vangorová

Bystrzak, Magdalena: A critic in society. Disputes of Alexander Matuška (1930–1938)

9

Authors: Daniela Kodajová

Andrej Sládkovič (1820 – 1872) was not only a priest and a poet: he also wrote reports from cultural and political events and provided feedback to the works of others. Among other things, he considerably contributed to the publication of the minutes and diary from the Slovak national assembly held in Martin on 6th and 7th June 1861 where the Memorandum of the Slovak nation was adopted. A. Sládkovič assembled all the materials from the event and prepared them for publication. His goals in this regard were to provide information, preserve the memory of the events, and reflect on the activities of the Slovak nationally-oriented intelligentsia. In this way, he captured the personalities connected to the national movement and events forming national awareness. The article describes the circumstances under which A. Sládkovič participated on the documenting of the memorandum assembly and shows that he contributed not only to the preparation of the materials for publication, but also to the capturing of the atmosphere under which the document was written.

11

Authors: Miloslav Vojtech

The article deals with tales in verse authored by the Slovak Romantic poet Janko Kráľ (1822 – 1876). These have traditionally been presented in literary historiography as generic realisations of the Byronic type of tale in verse. The article takes a closer look at this generic categorisation and discusses the extent to which it is accurate. By means of comparative analysis, the article confronts the source Byronic model of the genre with its Slovak realisations. It discusses similarities and differences between the texts authored by G. G. Byron and those written by Janko Kráľ on several levels – ideational-thematic, the construction of characters, relationship between epic and lyric components, fragmentariness of narration, length of the text, and spatial-temporal contexts. Comparison of the poems shows that J. Kráľ did not fully realise the typical generic form of Byronic Romanticism – the Byronic type of tale in verse –, but only partially adopted some of its typological features. J. Kráľ created a distinctive and in many ways specific type of tale in verse which differs from the Byronic model of the genre. Therefore, the traditional labelling of the Slovak Romantic poet’s tales in verse as “Byronic” does not appear to be overly adequate.

16

Authors: Martin Braxatoris

The term “scientific edition” is used in a host of different ways and is often understood as a synonym or partial synonym for “academic edition” or “critical edition.” Critical edition is also understood differently in different contexts – either broadly (as a critically edited text with a commentary) or narrowly (as a scientific edition with an extensive commentary). As a result of the emergence of digital media, new impulses for redefining the term “scientific edition” have been brought about by the digital humanities. The article aims at providing a general definition of the scientific edition for print and digital editions and tackles the issue of terminological ambiguity concerning the scientific and critical edition. This vagueness can be observed on the permeability of the boundaries of the given classes in the direction of certain types of editions (documentary and reading edition). Taking into consideration the specific requirements made on digital scientific editions, the article analyses the used terminology and proposes to employ the term “edition on digital medium” for digital editions, digitalised print editions, and editions which were designed for the electronic medium, but did not take the requirements given by the digital paradigm into account.

16

Authors: Anna Kobylińska

The fragment “Predhovor k Vojne [Foreword to the war]” is part of the literary estate of Janko Kráľ (1822 – 1876), best known under its first editorial title Dráma sveta [Drama of the world]. The fragment has no title in the manuscript and it was not published before 1938. With regards to its genre and poetics, however, the text is a clear example of a Slovak Romantic fragment – an emblematic genre of the Slovak Literary Romanticism. The article bases its interpretation on the culturological and philosophical take on the theory of the point (A. Kunce) and research of the fragment as a genre, especially on its position in the writings of the representative of early Romanticism, Novalis (1772 – 1801) and in German philosophical school in Jena in general. The article tackles “Foreword to the war” as an example of a text in which modern aesthetics (labelled as “the poetics of the ruins”) blends into the theological disposition of Slovak literary practice (figuratively termed as “speech from the catacombs”) which appears to be a modality of Slovak literature within the Romantic paradigm. The analysed fragment testifies to the hermetic and apocalyptic profile of the “Slovak fragment” and in this way addresses the issue of the literary genre of the apocalypse in Slovak Romantic literature.

3

Authors: Angela Škovierová

Vráblová, Timotea, ed.: Occasion in Slovak literature of earlier periods

4

Authors: Pavol Markovič

Vráblová, Timotea: Life on the battlegrounds of this world

5

Authors: Erika Brtáňová

Sermon literature, as documented by manuscripts and prints archived in Slovak memory preservation institutions, played an important role in Slovak literature of older periods since as early as the Middle Ages. Texts of sermons testify to the key developmental processes in the history of Slovak literature, document the changes in languages used (leading to the use of the native language – Slovak), and reflect the values and topical issues of individual periods. Other fields of research – besides theology – started focusing on Slovak homiletic literature after the Velvet Revolution when religious genres started enjoying greater scholarly interest. The widening of research focus so that it would encompass new themes and research viewpoints can most readily be observed in monographs from the fields of philology, history, and literary history. Religious writing is also the focus of three research projects concentrating on Slovak and Central European texts. A common feature of these is a mutual cooperation between specialists and intensified academic communication and exchange of experience on the international level.

6

Authors: Dana Hučková

Róbert Kiss Szemán, ed.: The OTHER Kollár – Kollár and the OTHER

10

Authors: Marzanna Kuczyńska

Theologian and polemicist Hypatius Pociej (Polish: Hipacy Pociej, 1541 – 1613) was a bishop of the eparchy of Volodymyr-Brest (now a part of Ukraine) and since 1599 until his death, he was Metropolitan of Kiev. He was Protestant, later Orthodox, and then Unitarian. Hypatius played an active role in the Union of Brest which aimed at uniting the Orthodox Church with the Catholic one. His polemical texts have rarely been the subject of academic study – especially so in the context of historical-religious context of the era. Still less researched is the polemic included in the collection of sermons published by the printing house of Supraśl monastery by the theologian and metropolitan Leon Kiszka (1663 – 1728) in 1714 in Polish translation under the title Kazania y homilie męża Bożego nieśmiertelney sławy: y pamięci Hipacyusza Pocieia […] z listem Melecyusza Patryarchy Alexandryiskiego, a responsem Hipacyusza [Sermons and homilies of the man of god of immortal fame and memory, Hypatius Pociej (…) with a letter by Meletius, Patriarch of Alexandria and a response from Hypatius]. The Polish translator made significant changes to the original text and adapted it to the new circumstances. Since in the early 18th century, the main task of the polemicists was a unification of the nation in one – Catholic – faith, Kiszka advocated the union in a narrowly Counter-Reformation spirit. The collection of sermons is a declaration of the sense of belonging and a programmatic manifest of the union. This was markedly strengthened by the polemic in the new Baroque-Counter-Reformation light.

11

Authors: Erika Brtáňová

The poet, author, and Protestant priest Bohuslav Tablic (1769 – 1732) only published seven occasional speeches from his sermon writings. As he explained, this was due to the lowered interest of the readers in religious literature as such. Sermons that were published strongly aimed at forming the readers’ values and opinions with respect to general religious issues. Influenced by Enlightenment rationalism, Tablic focused on moral norms in his sermons. He saw the solution to the critical state of his own Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession and the loose morals of its members in a deepening of the confessional awareness of the community. He believed in a strong (supernatural) motivation of religion towards moral purity and sought the benefits of religion in spiritual unity of the society, its effective working, and quality social relations. He saw religion as a significant educational and culture-forming phenomenon. The country’s progress in Tablic’s view was to be based on active participation of morally mature and educated citizens on the religious and public life. In his sermons, like in his other writings, he is a moderate enlightened thinker and author.

17

Authors: Peter Benka

The article looks into tasks assigned to the preaching office in Protestant communities in towns of Upper Hungary in the 16th and 17th centuries (Pentapolitana league). It tackles the issue from the perspective of the history of ideas and contextual historical analysis. The analysis is based on a corpus of theological and normative texts of secular and religious character from the studied region. An outline of the theological frame (given by basic dogmatic texts) that for the Protestant communities served as the background for defining the nature of preaching office is followed by an analysis of expectations set by the representatives of the local church and town communities. Key to these are the matters of dogmatic orthodoxy and issues related to the contents of preaching, the expected social impact, and requirements set on preachers by secular and religious bodies. The article also outlines the opportunities and limitations for implementation of the idealised image of the preaching office in specific conditions of individual towns, especially with regards to educational and dogma-related requirements and the conflicting potential of preaching with respect to the secular power.

4

Authors: Joanna Goszczyńska

Samo Bohdan Hroboň - The Prayer of the Slovak Sick Beggar in the interpretation of Ján Zambor

4

Authors: Barbora Zlejšia

Kubínová Marie: The space-time of the lyric

7

Authors: Ivana Hostová

The article discusses the diversity of understanding about the category of poetry at the backdrop of the tension between substantial definitions of poetry (and the lyric) and functional and sociological approaches to literature. After addressing the limitations of Jonathan Culler’s construction of the identity of the lyric, it summarises Miroslav Červenka’s views on what constitutes poetry in the era when metre, rhyme, and other formal elements are no longer operative with regards to defining poetry. Subsequently, it provides a short discussion of sociological approaches to the study of literature in the context of other social phenomena (Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour) and lists a few cases which demonstrate the way literary fame was evidently consciously created by actors and groups in the literary field (Walt Whitman, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Emily Dickinson). In the final sections, the article briefly mentions several similar examples from post-1989 Slovak poetry, addresses the ways in which modern and contemporary poetry crosses various boundaries, and introduces the articles included in this special issue of Slovenská literatúra.

10

Authors: Matúš Mikšík

The article reads Miroslav Válek’s (1927 – 1991) poem “Večer [Evening]” published in the poet’s first collection of verse Dotyky ([Touches], 1959) as a deconstructive subversion of lyric tradition – of Ivan Krasko’s (1876 – 1958) symbolist model of the lyric and Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809 – 1849) “The Raven” (1845). The author argues that Válek subverts the tradition by the specific way he tackles the motifs of the night, rain, and raven known in the Slovak poetry mainly from the writing of Ivan Krasko and by the way the poet updates the lyric situation of Poe’s notoriously well-known poem and its central motif. Another aspect that gets subverted is the tragic-elegiac melancholic modality of the poem. The analysis notices the first line of the poem where the night setting is outlined, then moves on to the key image of rain “without melancholy” and the updated motif of the raven. Finally, it discusses the detachment of the speaker from what goes on in the poem – the speaker in the poem is different from the subject affected by emotions and moods modelled in the lines. The reading grasps Válek’s poem and sophisticated subversive deconstruction of the traditional model of symbolic poem concerned with romantic love.

16

Authors: Karel Piorecký – Zuzana Husárová

One of the aims of this study is to present foreign, Czech, and Slovak projects created by generating literary texts through the use of artificial neural networks (we propose the term synthetic textual media). However, the main goal is to provide a critical analysis of the presentation strategies applied in the publication and promotion of the results of these projects. We will therefore test the hypothesis that these modes of presentation lead to the mythicisation of artificial intelligence and inappropriately skew the share of human and non-human involvement in the production of generative texts. We understand synthetic textual media and their presentational paratexts in complementary textual relations, and stress the necessity of critically analysing them as a whole. This stems from the fact that the current practice of literature generated by artificial neural networks is not suitable for a close reading approach without reductive reception and (mis)interpretation. We are also aware of the specificity of the reception processes initiated by literary texts of this kind and strive to support the concept of literary metareading, which we consider more appropriate for the technological and literary levels of this type of text.

25

Authors: Jaroslav Šrank – Ivana Hostová – Róbert Novotný

The article focuses on poetological and axiological analysis of the Slovak collection of poems Liza Gennart: Výsledky vzniku ([Outcomes of origin], 2020). The collection is part of the project created by the poet and theorist of electronic literature, Zuzana Husárová (b. 1983) and the sound artist and programmer Ľubomír Panák (b. 1979) who trained a neural network to generate its poems. Texts generated by neural networks are usually referred to as synthetic. In the article, we therefore propose to use the term synthetic poetry to denote poetry generated by neural networks. Introductory parts of the article address the global contexts in which such a work of literature is nested (changes in the economy, position of literature in the current world, problems faced by the humanities today) and technological issues pertaining to natural language processing. What follows is a literary-historical contextualisation in which we outline the history of generative writing in Slovak literature, the issue of authorial teams co-creating poetry, and virtual authorial signatures. In concluding section, the article provides a textual analysis and proposes to conceptualise this instance of synthetic poetry in terms of (1) poetics of defect, (2) poetics of incoherence, and (3) poetics of reduction.

3

Authors: Simona Bajáková

Likavčan, Lukáš: Introduction to Comparative Planetology

3

Authors: Martina Péterová

Charvát, Martin: Magical crossing: Karel Teige and Vítězslav Nezval

6

Authors: Jana Piroščáková

Rácová, Veronika: Editing basics 1

8

Authors: Anikó Dušíková

The article aims at describing some of the particulars of the formation of national identities in the 19th century in the work of Ján Palárik (1822 – 1870) Inkognito ([Incognito]1858) and Ján Kalinčiak (1822 – 1871) Reštavrácia ([County elections], 1860), Milkovhrob ([Milko’s grave]1845/1846), and Knieža liptovské ([Prince of Liptov], 1852). The article analyses these worksthrough the prism of Ján Chalupka’s (1791 – 1871)oeuvre which, with regards to identities, seeks a balance between national identities in the multilingual Hungary. Ján Palárik and Ján Kalinčiak strive for similar goals in these works. Key notions in this regard are future and progress which is connected with youth. Starting point in this respect is the self-reflective space of the fictitious town of Kocúrkovo as the space of a possible, projected change embodied in the character of the young teacher Svoboda. Attention is devoted to the hypothesised reasons underlying those attitudes that diverge from the notions established in (national) cultural memory (such as the problem of the relationship towards Hungarian literary tradition or interpretations of the past). The article mainly focuses on the elements reflecting the relationship towards the Hungarian context of the times.

13

Authors: József Demmel

The article analyses the novel Reštavrácia ([County elections], 1860) by Ján Kalinčiak (1822 – 1871) through the prism of historical documents. The novel takes as its basis the historical events of 1845 – 1846 election campaigns in the Turiec County. The article identifies the historical figures on which the novel’s characters were built. Such reading of this literary work is not methodologically inappropriate – the elections had a significant bearing on the future events connected with historical events central to the building of the Slovak nation and identity. The analysis provided in the article helps understand the historical circumstances and the context of Slovak national revival of the 1860s and 1870s. This referential reading also helps clarify and revaluate Ján Kalinčiak’s position on the matter. At the same time, it provides one of the backgrounds for the literary reading of the novel.

16

Authors: Zora Prušková

Research of arts and literature had moved from a striving for exact, structuralist handlings of its objects to observations of the world as mediated and experienced by humans. Research in aesthetics and literary studies not embedded in structuralism is often interdisciplinary in its nature and draws on a host of inspirations (anthropology, epistemology of imaginative processes, ontological transformations of existential meanings, etc.). The creative process and its product – the literary text – can be handled from various viewpoints. Traditionally, literary studies approached the text in terms of its structure, aesthetics, and poetics. Such observations do offer a systematic way in which the functioning and form of the literary work can be described; however, they are much less capable of grasping the ontological sources and origins of aesthetic experience. The latter are inherent to the engagement with an aesthetic object and as such need to be taken into account in the creation of knowledge and value of the literary work. Respecting the psychological subject of the writer and of communicative configurations of the literary text is crucial in this context. The article looks under the surface of textual structures and concentrates on imaginative processes in connection to thereception intention of the literary work.