Slovenská literatúra

3

Authors: Dana Hučková

Kalnická, Zdeňka: Interpretation

5

Authors: Vladimír Barborík

Jančovič, Ivan – Lizoň, Martin – Zemaníková, Nadežda: Literature and its Conceptualisation in Educational Systems Metaphors

6

Authors: Zuzana Obertová

Čižmárová, Mária, ed.: Slavic Inter-Literary Contacts in Central European Cultural Space

10

Authors: Ingrid Papp

Accounts of the character and deeds of Nikola IV Zrinski (1508 – 1566) who became renowned for preventing the fall of Szigetvár in 1566 and of the work and life of his great-grandson Nikola VII Zrinski (1620 – 1664), a 17th-century baroque poet, had long played central roles in the building of national awareness and political ideology in Hungary. The Slavic inhabitants of the Kingdom of Hungary were familiar with the general who fought against the Ottoman Empire since the 16th century, but in the 19th century, in the context of the idea of Slavic mutuality and Pan-Slavism, this historical figure became more important. In 1866, Andrej Sládkovič (1820 – 1872) wrote a historical epic Gróf Mikuláš Šubić Zrínsky na Sihoti [Count Nikola Šubić Zrinski at Sziget] in which he described Zrinski’s heroic deeds from the perspective of Pan-Slavic identity in detail. He drew on Ján Kollár’s sonnet “My sme dali Uhrům Zríniho” [We gave Zrinski to the Hungarians] included in his Slávy dcera ([The daughter of Sláva] final version published in 1852). The sonnet asserts that the Slavs left Zrinski to the Hungarians, just like they left Ján Hus to the Germans and Nicolaus Copernicus to the Italians and that they also gave up Zrinski’s legacy. In his epic poem, with the help of the poetry of his grandson, he returned Zrinski to the Slavic Pantheon.

24

Authors: Ivan Halász

The article concentrates on the image and reception of Slovak literature in specialised Hungarian-language texts from the period of Austro-Hungarian Compromise. In the history of Slovak-Hungarian relations, this period was one of the most complicated: the middle classes were being speedily assimilated and the Slovak culture was under intense pressure of the state and Hungarian culture. The first comprehensive publication on Slovak literature in this period was written by Imre Gáspár as early as 1879, but it remained without much feedback. Subsequent articles and encyclopaedic entries were penned by Slovak authors who either worked in Budapest as civil servants (Samo Czambel, Adolf Pechány) or were based directly in Martin, Slovakia (Jozef Škultéty). Škultéty was invited to write on Slovak literature by the Budapest-based professor Oszkár Asbóth who also authored a journal article on Svetozár Hurban Vajanský. Despite differences in authors’ social and cultural backgrounds, the narrative texts share several similarities: in the introduction, they provide a general overview of the history of the Slovak language and literature and then deal with outer-literary aspects in the works of a few authors and looked for similarities. The works of Ján Hollý and Andrej Sládkovič were held in especially high esteem.

4

Authors: Petra Nagyová

Review

8

Authors: Vladimíra Mravcová

The article focuses on the image of Bratislava during the first Czechoslovak Republic as presented in Ivan Horváth’s novella Laco a Bratislava. The city is viewed through the prism of the protagonist’s revaluation of his ideals and as a site of the possibilities it provides on the personal and social level. The movement of the hero through the city bears traces of imitation of certain literary traditions that creatively make use of motives typical for education or disillusionment novels as well as discourses bearing initiation function. In this way, Bratislava becomes a space of emotional education. The hero’s striving for self-actualisation is paralleled with Bratislava’s ambitions to develop, modernise or imitate the style of big cities. His attitude towards the city is analogous with a relationship with a woman. Bratislava is portrayed as a lover, maiden, dark lady or a double. The atmosphere with which the city is invested mirrors the development of a romantic relationship. At first, it is dreamy, postcard-like, melancholic, drawing on memories and history and invested with a hope for a future. The loss of certainty in the romantic relationship, revelation of the city’s social inequalities and the impossibility of self-actualisation are reflected in its changed atmosphere. Disillusionment and nostalgia prevail as the protagonist is leaving Bratislava, hoping for a return which, however, cannot be granted. The city is also portrayed through glimpses of scenes in cafés and exotic air of its oriental features.

9

Authors: Josef Hrdlička

The article addresses the problem of the city as a semiotic space that is defined by its boundary. The first part of the paper presents some of the models of this semiotic boundary and then looks at the city in Bohumil Hrabal’s novel In-House Weddings (1984). Methodologically, the article draws on semiotic works of J. M. Lotman and K. H. Stierle. Hrabal’s novel provides an image of the city in the period of political upheaval. This can be seen as a recoding of the old arrangement of the city to a new one and is exemplified on the fates of several characters. Several borderline protagonists, namely the central protagonist – the narrator – and the character of the doctor come to the fore in this process. These, rather than creating the outer limits of the city, form its inner boundaries. They share some features with the inhabitants of the city, but also occupy the position of strangers. They belong neither to the old nor the new political establishment and attempt to flee the city or view it from the position that is different from both relatively static establishments. Further on, a key role in this respect is played by elements of disorder owing to which the city’s semiosphere vanishes into unrestrained chaos. In this respect, it is possible to relate Hrabal’s text to the catastrophic model that exceeds the purely semiotic approach.

11

Authors: Radoslav Passia

At the turn of the 21st century, the spatial turn that took place in various fields of humanities and social sciences could also be observed in literary studies. On the international level, research was inspired by topics and theories from such fields as architecture, urban studies, sociology or anthropology. Slovak literary studies, however, has not been significantly inspired by geopoetics and has not devoted systematic attention to the study of urban locations and motives. This article provides a basic overview of existing research into the representations of urban settings in Slovak literature. It maps topics and methodological background of individual research initiatives with a special focus on literary and artistic representations of Bratislava. The paper also outlines new lines of inquiry, such as the relationship between literary representations of the city in the post-socialist Central Europe and the phenomenon of nostalgia. It also suggests the possibilities of comparative research. With regards to the latter, the author argues that juxtaposing literary representations of Bratislava with representations of urban settings in the literatures of other European “small nations” (Miroslav Hroch) offers more fruitful ground for research than searching for similarities in culturally and geographically closer Hungarian or Czech literature. The article also provides a list of selected literature on the problematics of urban representations in Slovak literature and culture.

11

Authors: Nora Nagyová

The aim of the article is to outline the problem of the urban topos in dramatic writing. The analysis is conducted on two plays by Viliam Klimáček, namely his Ginsberg v Bratislave (Beat Generation 1965) [Ginsberg in Bratislava (Beat Generation 1965); 2008] and Socík, sladký socík (alkoholický sprievodca socialistickou Bratislavou) [Socialism, sweet socialism (An alcoholic guide to socialist Bratislava); 2016] both of which deal with the socialist era. The introductory part of the article concentrates on Klimáček’s personal relationship to Bratislava and on specific locations portrayed in the two plays. The section devoted to the basic theoretical foundations of the problem of space in literature and drama concentrates mainly on the structuring of the dramatic text. It addresses the specific character of such a text as well as its dual form of existence (as a written text and as a stage production) that substantially influence the problematic portrayal of the urban setting. The textual handling of the space is confronted with its stage realisation which differs from the written form of the play. The differences once again testify to the dual character of the dramatic text which is written as a literary piece, but is prototypically realised on the stage.

12

Authors: Viliam Nádaskay

After the Second World War, Bratislava underwent a radical spatial and ideological reconstruction. The reconstruction of the city was projected into poetry and its imagery in the socialist semantic code. The article focuses on the analysis and evaluation of the new meanings Bratislava as a symbolic space of historical events (and their influence on the daily life of its inhabitants) acquired during the post-war reconstruction process. The article builds on Henri Lefebvre’s thesis that states that every revolution must also alter and create its own space, otherwise it does not fully utilise its potential. Investigations into the artistic representations of Bratislava are complemented by urbanist and sociological reflections on socialist urban space, as well as semiotic works of Vladimír Macura and Daniela Hodrová. In this respect, poetic representations of Slovakia’s capital city may be divided according to three aspects: historical, reconstruction and private. These polarise the space into the city centre and periphery and recode their meanings. The image of the city is thus inclined towards a certain type of utopia – in the specific case of Bratislava it is a utopia in mid-(re)construction. Capturing the period image of the city as outlined in the 1950s poetry aims at contributing to the more complex picture of the symbolic meaning of Bratislava in the cultural memory of the 20th century.

12

Authors: Jana Dudková

The article deals with the way Bratislava was portrayed in Slovak films with urban settings produced in the first decade of the 21st century and shows how these portrayals changed over this period. Methodologically, the article is based on basic heuristics, i.e. on the analysis of the films themselves. The aim of the paper is to provide a general overview rather than an in-depth analysis of individual pieces. The author draws on her previous research in the area, especially on her Slovenský film v ére transkulturality [Slovak film in the era of transculturality; 2011]. By widening the corpus, she tests the relevance of concepts used in film studies at the turn of the millennia (“lifestyle urban film”, “non-places”, “supermodernity”, “postmodernity”) for chosen films. The aim of the paper is to map the portrayals of Bratislava and devise their basic typology, while accentuating the narrative of Slovak cinematography as a series of films reacting to each other, gradually shifting their focus from the historical city centre to the places on the right side of the Danube (e.g. Veľký rešpekt [Big respect], Bratislavafilm) and subsequently to other Slovak regions and towns.

13

Authors: Jozef Tancer

The article analyses the image of Bratislava in the 1936 ethnographic-literary travelogue Columbus in der Slowakei [Columbus in Slovakia] by the Austrian author Leopold Wolfgang Rochowanski (1888 – 1961). Drawing on Paul Rodaway’s sensuous geographies, the article takes a look at how Rochowanski connects the flaneur’s view of the city with sensual perception, especially taste, sound and vision and constructs the “city’s specific tone” – a unique flavour of Bratislava. Flaneur’s view determines both the elements from which the image of the city is composed (cafés, wine bars, restaurants) and the fragmentary narrative techniques that combine anecdotes, legends, stories and musings of the narrator with historical-ethnographic discourse. Rochowanski accentuates cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the place and in doing so semantically opens Bratislava’s urban text. As the result of period political context, however, he also ignores or marginalises some of the semantic layers of the city (portrayal of Jews) and in effect reduces the urban text. Rochowanski portrays Bratislava as a space of imagination coded in a complex way. From the point of view of perception, this prevents the separation of material and non-material (imaginary) layers of the urban palimpsest.

4

Authors: Irena Bilińska

The poet, translator, literary critic and protestant priest Andrej Sládkovič (1820 – 1872) is generally considered a foremost poet of the Romantic generation. He authored two key works of Slovak literary Romanticism, Marína (1846) and Detvan (1853) – long poems that have significantly influenced further development of literature written in Slovak. There are two basic positions from which literary history views his oeuvre. These are based on the divided standpoints from which the whole period of Slovak literary Romanticism is viewed. Academics either see it as a single, undivided, conservative and nation-centred unit or as a polyphonic and progressive movement open to other European literatures. Advocates of the former opinion interpret Sládkovič’s works as part of national literary history the aim of which is the assertion of folk national identity. The opposing group of scholars emphasises the unique qualities of Sládkovič’s poetry and positions it within wider philosophical and aesthetic contexts of 19th-century European culture. From this point of view, developmental interferences of Slovak Romantic literature are seen as a dynamic part of multifaceted processes of the given period.

5

Authors: Anna Bukovinová

Reviews

7

Authors: Magdalena Bystrzak

Research activities and civil actions of Alžbeta Gwerková Göllnerová have recently become the focus of research attention. This contribution provides an overview of the literature on the topic and summarises the perspectives that were brought about by the interdisciplinary discussions that emerged from the online research seminar that took place on 28th January 2021. The seminar was organised by the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and civil organisation Reminiscencie. It was a preparatory stage for the multi-authored monograph on Alžbeta Gwerková Göllnerová. The aim of the publication is to provide a collection of contemporary interpretations of her life and work, evaluate the accessible materials and create room for editorial preparation of archival documents. The publication primarily focuses on evaluating the position of Alžbeta Gwerková Göllnerová as a representative of the state-forming Czechoslovak milieu in the context of the First Czechoslovak Republic and on an adequate evaluation of her positions and activities during the First Slovak Republic. Apart from that, the authors aim at mapping women’s handling of progressive, democratic reformism of the 1930s. The publication equally wishes to address the topic of canonisation of chosen aspects of post-1989 cultural memory.

10

Authors: Kristína Gotthardtová

The poetry of Andrej Sládkovič (1820 – 1872) has become a strong source of inspiration for several Slovak musical composers. Their motivation, choice of poems and compositional approaches varied in time. In the 19th century, adaptations of Sládkovič’s shorter poems for a cappella choirs were popular (J. L. Bella, A. H. Krčméry, M. Francisci). The ideas of national emancipation formed the background for these. In the 20th century, greater variance in compositional approaches can be observed. However, these were based on a smaller number of the poems. The article analyses concretisations of various musical genres from the musical adaptation (of the long poem Marína) for an a cappella choir (Andrej Očenáš, 1957) and vocal-instrumental oratorio (Cyril a Metod – Constantine and Methodius, Tibor Andrašovan, 1987) through musical theatre and scenic music to multimedia composition. It takes a closer look at three adaptations of Detvan and describes the different authorial handlings of the poem. While Viliam Figuš-Bystrý’s opera (premiered 1928) illustrates the musical thinking of the late 19th century on a representative genre, the further two point to the use of progressive compositional techniques of the second half of the 20th century and represent utility music (Bartolomej Urbanec, 1963; Tadeáš Salva, 1975).

12

Authors: Martin Navrátil

In 1846, one of the most important works of Slovak literary Romanticism, Andrej Sládkovič’s (1820 – 1872) long poem Marína was published in the newly-codified Slovak language. Its second edition, which took into account the dynamic development of this young language, played an important role in the publishing tradition of the poem. Sládkovič revised it in cooperation with the editor Karol Viktorin (1822 – 1874) and it was printed in the series Spisy básnické Andreja Sládkoviča [Poetic writings of Andrej Sládkovič]. Since then, several editors attempted at bringing forth their editions of this canonical work. The latest edition was prepared by Cyril Kraus (1928 – 2012) at a time of a rapid development of Slovak textology. The period publishing conditions were also favourable and owing to these, Kraus not only had the largest corpus of sources at his disposal, but could also rely on these relatively developed publishing techniques. His text has become the authoritative source for later editions. The article takes a look at the various editions of Marína and analyses editorial practices used by Jozef Karol Viktorin and Cyril Kraus.

19

Authors: Gabriela Mihalková

Religious writings, intimately linked to his occupation of protestant priest, are an integral part of Andrej Sládkovič’s (1820 – 1872) oeuvre. They can be grouped into several genres, including religious reflective and occasional poetry, prayers, sermons and sermon outlines. Up until now, little attention has been paid to sermon outlines which he had been writing since 1847. This article analysed a selection of sermon outlines from the liturgical year 1850 – 1851. The analysis focused on their thematic features. These ranged from theological and dogmatic through occasional and ethical to moralising, formulated mainly from the position of the ethics of moral duty. Social-moral qualities as realised in the relationship of an individual towards another (specific) individual (in familial, marital or friendly context), and towards the human being in general as well as the society, world and humankind (in the form of social-moral qualities such as solidarity, help and charity) are central focal points of these texts.

4

Authors: Eva Palkovičová

Reviews

5

Authors: Patrik L. Baka

Reviews

13

Authors: Zora Prušková

The subject of the paper is to observe a coincidence between description and performance in autobiographic narratives. As an example, this phenomenon is traced in autobiographic writings by the Slovak prose writer Alta Vášová (1939), produced between the years 1995 and 2019. Her prose works Úlety/Flights of Fancy, Ostrovy nepamäti/Islands of Non-memory, Sfarbenia/Colorations, Menoslov/Name List, Dolety a Odlety/Ranges and Departures feature a strange type of memoir writing, which points to a certain general semiotic property of autobiographic memoir narration. From the semiotic, referential and stylistic points of view, this type of writing is part of latent discussion on the nature of creative work with a literary text at the level of basic stylistic and composition techniques of epic: description, narration and performative perspective of narrative representations. The paper is an attempt at presenting their mutual coincidence, inseparability and poetological scaling in Alta Vášová´s memoir writing. It also raises the question of performative and descriptive modality of recollecting (as a substitute of culture and history) in memoir writing.

18

Authors: Jozef Kordoš

The goal of the paper is to characterize the narrative techniques that Matthias Bel (1684 – 1749) used in his paper Vedomosti o Tekovskej stolici (Knowledge of the Tekov County, 1742), usually considered to be a historiographic work. It tracks the passages where Bel´s commentary overlaps with other genres or scientific branches, and draws attention to the elements that make it possible to classify the work as a chorography. Bel´s aim was not only to systematically collect the accurate facts about the region but, apparently, also to saturate various needs of well-educated readership that finds pleasure in examining the picture of the region through a miscellaneous collection of natural particularities and specific cultural manifestations. Since the commentary on the Tekov county seeks support in quotations from the travelogue Letters from Travels (1700) written by the Dutch traveller Jakob Tollius (1633 – 1696), the reader explores the region as a traveller not only being accompanied by well-educated and sophisticated Bel, but also regularly through Tollius´s gripping narrations. Another dominant element of the commentary is a number of etiologic legends, which Bel in the position of a collector of oral folk culture presents as an outstanding narrator. Comparison with other authors who also visited and described the region (F. E. Brückmann, E. Brown) shows that these digressions are a specific feature of Bel´s picture of the Tekov county.

4

Authors: Debnár, Marek

Over the last decades, the significant increase in digital resources has initiated research into the humanities and social sciences that is based on data, technology, and quantitative statistical methods. What all this research has in common is the concept of the digital humanities (hereinafter referred to as DH), which has even influenced the classic and perhaps most common approach to knowledge in the humanities – reading. Extensive digitisation of manuscripts, books, magazines, and other texts into electronic corpora has created a need not only to rethink and redefine the concept of reading and its variations (especially in relation to close reading and distant reading), but also to specify the methodology and possibilities of digital text analysis. This monographic edition of Slovenská literatúra aims to present digital literary research in the wider context of specific research programmes, projects, and infrastructures. This edition has been published with the support of the Slovak Academy of Sciences provided as part of the international scientific and technical cooperation project COST Action CA 16204: Distant Reading for European Literary History (1840 – 1920).

9

Authors: Debnár, Marek - Yesypenko, Dmytro

The paper deals with problems of building representative digital literary collections of national literatures, in particular those of Slovak and Ukrainian literatures, within the international context of the project European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC). At the beginning text characterizes the requirements laid down on creation and representativeness of such a national multilingual literary collection, which is established as a result of the project COST – Distant Reading for European Literary History (1840 – 1920) and analyzes various factors related to literary production in Slovakia and Ukraine. On the one hand, it includes a discrepancy between stronger partners of the project (socalled great European literatures) and weaker partners (so-called small literatures), on the other hand, the factor of accessibility of digital sources corresponding to the requirements of a project of this kind.

14

Authors: Boszorád, Martin - Malíček, Juraj

The main ambition of the paper is a reflection on the relation between literature and digitality, or verification of the potential of reserch into literature seen in the context of the (post)digital civilizational and cultural situation, which decisively influences the way literature as such exists, or the way it circulates and resonates in culture. The subject of the interest is digitalized literature, i.e. converted into numbers, in a narrow or specific sense, new-medium literature. The authors use the example of Andrzej Sapkowsky's fiction and its video game post-texts produced by the developer CD Projekt Red to find out what happens to literature converted into the form of a digital game. The leitmotif of the reflection is the binary opposition of the iconic (defining literature) and the operative (defining digital games) as well as the very literary scientific and fundamental issues such as the issue of a story and its relation to narration. In terms of the concept and the method, the key question is the question of the genre, i.e. fantasy, where the authors reflect on the specific form of digital literature from the perspective of pop culture, i.e. the optics which makes it possible to view the matters not through the prism of literary types but through the prism of genres.

16

Authors: Piorecký, Karel - Škrabal, Michal

The paper is an attempt at a quantitative corpus related approach to the subject of multilingualism in contemporary Czech poetry (published both in books and on literary servers). The authors of the paper examine the frequency and distribution of foreign (i.e., non-Czech) lexical units, raising questions about the forms and functions of individual lexemes. Three selected poets (T. Kafka, M. Šanda, M. Torčík) are then analyzed more in-depth. The paper is also a report about a currently developed database – The Corpus of Contemporary Czech Poetry – and possibilities of using it. It suggests how beneficial the quantitative data analysis in the first phase of linguistically oriented literary research can be, pointing to the necessity of interconnecting the quantitative and qualitative approaches. It is only the researcher´s interpretative competence that can define the boundaries of the research field and the significance of its elements. When conducting text-centered analyses, language corpora should begin to play a role similar to other scientific infrastructure tools, such as bibliographic databases.

16

Authors: Zumrík, Miroslav

The paper reflects on a freely accessible program to annote, analyze and visualize literary texts called CATMA, which is developed by the narratological team led by Jan Christoph Meister in Hamburg, which follows the tradition of the German research into the area of digital or quantitative narratology. The design of the annotation program develops the conceptual apparatus of classical narratology and these (e.g. Genettian types of anisochrony) are implemented in digitally supported analysis and interpretation of semantics in the genre of short story. Furthermore, annotation and visualization do not replace quantitative analysis, what they do is prepare for a literary scientist a kind of a cognitive map which may help them notice potentially interesting (ir)regularities of texture of the work (grammatical, morphological, semantic features). The CATMA tool thus opens possibilities not only for quantitative study of authors´corpora but also for analysis of motifs which are in the sense of narrative semantics of fictitious worlds as formulated by Lubomír Doležel intentionally expressed by means of distribution of linguistic signs.