Slovenská literatúra

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.

3

Authors: Adriana Amir

Review

5

Authors: Nora Nagyová

Review

11

Authors: Erika Brtáňová

The paper is concerned with the editions of fiction works associated with the name of the evangelical preacher and teacher Ladislav Bartolomeides. In the first part the subject of the analysis is Bartolomeides´s reeditions of two Czech translations: a popular didactic satire Spis užitečný a velmi potřebný od Doktora Grobiana z upřímnosti učinený (A Useful and Really Necessary Treatise by Doctor Grobian Written in a Honest Manner, 1784) translated from German into Czech around the end of the 16th century and a work written by the ancient historian Josephus Flavius O válce židovské knihy sedmery (Seven Books on the Jewish War, 1805), which was translated from Latin by Pavel Aquilinus Hradecký (1533). The analysis shows the goal and the motives of Bartolomeides´s editorial activities and analyses the extent of the changes he made to the texts. The second part of the paper deals with editorial possibilities of presenting Bartolomeides´s original work Rozmlouvání Jozefa Druhého s Matějem Prvním Korvínus řečeným v království zemřelých (A Dialogue between Joseph II and Matthias I Corvinus in the Kingdom of the Dead, 1790), in which the form of the Lucianesque dialogue is joined with the defence of the monarch Joseph II. In order to assess all the functions of the text objectively there has been an idea to publish all the three versions together – the diplomatic transcription, the transcribed form and the translation into contemporary Slovak.

16

Authors: Martin Navrátil

The paper deals with alternatives and limitations of language updates of literary, in particular, poetic texts. It responds to a certain – in the Slovak context not at all unusual – approach to treating language material of literary texts, which leads to radical changes to the author´s language. The positive and negative aspects of this well-established approach have not yet been sufficiently reflected on. In this paper Slovak editorial practice is on the one hand confronted with the theoretical postulates of the national textological tradition (Jozef Felix, Karol Rosenbaum, Mikuláš Bakoš, Jozef Ambruš, Michal Gáfrik and others), on the other hand, it attempts at drawing inspirations from the Czech provenance (František Bačkovský, Otakar Hostinský, Michael Špirit), which at the end of the day aim at reduction of editorial changes and efforts to keep an author´s text as authentic as possible. This indicates an alternative manifesto attitude reducing radical changes made to literary texts, which would make it possible to achieve almost true sound qualities of literary texts.

19

Authors: Vladimír Barborík

The paper is based on the current conception of reception of the debut novel written by Dušan Kraus (1937 – 2001) Životy unikajúce/Lives Fleeing (1979). There are a genological and typological perspective and a literary historical perspective adopted in it, the paper offers an outline reconstruction of the literary career of a lesser-known writer. The subject of the analysis is the basic semantic layers of the work (language, narration, composition) and its genological and typological foundations. Within the context of prose written at that time, the novel is a specific piece of writing placed outside the established development lines. It is incompatible with what was introduced by the „novel situation“ at the turn of the 1980s, it is a work of production prose, while it is not influenced by ideological requirements, it is a contemporary piece of prose which was published at the time when Slovak literature was being dominated by past-bound works. Životy unikajúce/Lives Fleeing as a production or, alternatively, „work“ novel is an unusual variant of the subgenre in Slovak literature. In terms of evolution, it is situated somewhere halfway from the ideologically biased depiction of the work environment in the 1950s towards subversive recoding of the subject matter in the second half of the 1980s (in the works of the writers such as Peter Pišťanek and Dušan Taragel).

4

Authors: Martin Navrátil

Review

5

Authors: Dana Hučková

Review

10

Authors: Edita Príhodová

The paper analyzes the editorial strategies used by Július Pašteka when preparing the eight volume book edition of Súborné dielo / The Complete Works of Janko Silan (1914 – 1984), published in the years 1995 – 1998 in the Lúč publishing house. The analysis is focused on three collections of poems from the edition corpus, which were published over a span of almost four decades of the 20th century (Kuvici / Little Owls, 1936; Piesne z Javoriny / Songs from Javorina, 1943; Oslnenie / Bedazzlement, 1969). It mainly takes notice of the issue of editorial respect for the original text and the extent and types of changes made to the manuscripts of individual collections. This is the basis for identifying their nature and typology. In all the three selected examples J. Pašteka corrected the orthographic erros in line with the current orthographic standard, non-systemic errors and typos. However, in some places he also changed the stylistics, which disrupted the original intention of the author. The only time he gave reasons for the stylistic changes was in the debut book Kuvici / Little Owls, referring to inexperience of the debut author, which can be seen as an act falling out of the editor s competence. Another conflict with the writer´s will and choice occurred in case of changing the composition of the collection Oslnenie / Bedazzlement, when in contrast with the original edition some of the poems were omitted.

19

Authors: Miloslav Vojtech

The paper deals with the subject of the editorial and textological approaches to the texts of Slovak literature written in Bernolák´s Slovak in the years 1787 – 1852. It analyzes their typographic and orthographic particularities, it is concerned with variants of the orthographic standard at that time and presents methodological approaches to the subject of textology and editorial practice. In relation to the texts written in Bernolák´s Slovak, it identifies three editorial approaches which have been used in editorial practice since the mid-19th century. The first approach is represented by the editions which adapt the original language form of a text according to the current orthographic standard and the contemporary typographic rules; the second type is represented by the editions respecting the authentic language form of the original text, while they only eliminate some of the historical, archaic typographic particularities, and the third approach is related to updating literary texts written in Bernolák´s Slovak by translating them into contemporary Slovak. The paper also reflects on the overall approach of editors to texts written in Bernolák´s Slovak as textual sources and based on textological analyses of several editions, it deals with the issue of the quality of individual editorial procedures.

25

Authors: Charles Sabatos

The Ottoman invasions are among the most significant historical events in Central European literature as well as popular culture. An important example is the legendary „well of love“ at Trenčín Castle, supposedly dug by the Turkish Omar in order to free his beloved Fatima, held in captivity by Stephen Zápolya. Despite its setting in the 1490s, this story was first published in German in the early nineteenth century by Hungarian nobleman Alois Freiherrn von Mednyánszky, which inspired Slovak poetic adaptations of this tale by Karol Štúr (1844) and Mikuláš Dohnány (1846). The narrative was popularized in several collections of „historical“ tales set in Slovakia’s castles by twentieth-century authors such as Ľudovít Janota, Jozef Branecký, Jozef Horák and Ján Domasta, as well as in Jozef Nižnánsky’s historical novel The Well of Love (1935), which provides a concrete political background for the legend. Although the story’s events and characters (other than Zápolya) are fictional, it remains today one of the most enduring love stories in Slovak culture. This article will analyze the textual development of this legend in relation to evolving definitions of national identity over the last two centuries.