Slovenská literatúra

3

Authors: Jaroslava Šaková

Review

5

Authors: Michaela Soleiman pour Hashemi

Review

6

Authors: Miroslav Dudok

Review

15

Authors: Tamara Janecová

The goal of the paper is to present Margita Figuli´s novel Olovený vták/The Lead Bird by means of contemporary reading with regard to the historical and social context of its creation and its place in literary history. This pacifist piece of prose criticizing participation of Slovakia in the war against Poland (1939) is well-known for its controversial publication in the pro-regime magazine Slovenské pohľady (1940) led by the editor Stanislav Mečiar and an alleged connection to the writer´s follow-up dismissal from Tatra banka in 1941 – 1942. The interpretation of the novel, which has only been the subject of fragmentary analysis to date, is concerned with the key points found in the text in terms of the structure and the spiritual dimension underrated so far. The text revolves around a character of a woman living in a tragic relation to the reality, which refers to the archetype of the mourning mother and the prototype of biblical Mary, alternatively ancient Niobe. The interpretation aims at the conclusion saying that the prose work can be included in the late line of expressionist prose. What helps cast light on the place of the book in the writer´s biography is her correspondence, publication activity, studies of literary scientists and knowledge of the historians analysing the period of the Slovak Republic (1939 – 1945).

18

Authors: Ján Gbúr – Anna Zelenková

Literary-historical paper deals with unknown Slovak and Hungarian poetic first-fruits of an important figure in Slovak literature, P. O. Hviezdoslav. The co-author of the study, Anna Zelenková, discovered and acquired the above-mentioned literary work from the family estate of Albert Pražák’s daughter, Hana Pražáková-Drábková. The first part of the study focuses on the relations between the Czech literary historian, A. Pražák, and the Slovak poet from 1913 until Hviezdoslav’s death. She specifically addresses the destiny of Hviezdoslav’s manuscript work, which the poet handed over to Pražák because the latter was supposed to write a monograph on the former. The second part of the study is mostly of an interpretive nature. First, she focuses her interpretive efforts on a collection of unknown Slovak poems by young Hviezdoslav, in which natural lyricism mingles with love themes and reflexive meditations. The latter are characteristic of most of his verses from the early creative period. In the second part of the study, she analyses Hungarian-written poems that young Hviezdoslav created during his high school studies in Miskolc. It pays special attention to the lyrical-epic composition of Tompakö, especially its Slovak legendary material, on which the subject part of the story is created, and to verse-related issues.

20

Authors: Andrea Draganová

The magazine Hlas, published between the years 1898 and 1904, had a significant impact on the political, social and cultural context at that time. Thinking in Slovakia in the 20th century was formed in relation to the magazine and its legacy on several levels. The goal of the paper is to carry out a survey of the reflections on the Hlasist movement, consciously constrained to the field of literature and literary science, although occasionally making inevitable references to a wider context of social science. The sources and texts analysed here are divided into four areas based on the time of creation, author´s position, text strategy assuming a target group, genre and interpretation range. The aim of the analysis is not a review of the stereotypes used to interpret the Hlasist movement so far but an attempt at new reading based on the latest methodologies. New reading of the texts indicates the literary historical process of creating the image of the Hlasist movement. It also defines the nature of the tools used by individual authors to create the given image (e.g. legitimization, canonization, ideological interpretation, subversion of the traditional interpretation etc.).

3

Authors: Vladimíra Mravcová

Review

4

Authors: Juliana Beňová

Review

7

Authors: Marijan Šabić

Svetozár Hurban Vajanský (1847 – 1916) had some contact with the Croatian environment and reflected on Croatian issues in his newspaper articles and literary texts several times. However, the book of his substantial correspondence only seldom features the contact with Croatian partners. The fact that Vajanský´s works were well-received in Croatia at that time can be proved by e.g. translations and reviews in the Information- overview section Listak of the magazine Vienac (1869 – 1903), which was Croatia´s most significant literary magazine in the 19th century. The subject of the paper is the contribution of the magazine Vienac to Vajanský´s reception by Croatian readers. The magazine mainly deserves credit for reassessment of his literary work, especially the prosaic part, which later resulted in publishing many translations of his proses in other Croatian literary magazines. Vajanský´s opus primarily earned praise for its aesthetic criteria and principles, which in contrast to young Croatian intellectuals was adhered to by the older, more conservative generation of Croatian writers, who in the late 19th century turned the magazine Vienac into their platform.

14

Authors: Miloslav Szabó

The goal of the paper is to stimulate discussion about literary antisemitism in modern Slovak literature exemplified by one of its most notable writers, František Švantner (1912 – 1950). In line with the research trends in the Czech and German contexts, it draws attention to interconnections between literature and other discourses at that time, and the ambivalent nature of depicting Jews in literature, where negative stereotypes are combined with seemingly positive ones (literary „allosemitism“). The analysis of two selected novels and one novella reveals a modernized stereotype of the „Jewish usurer“, which was present in Slovak literature from the early 19th century. Under the influence of the rasist discourse the usurer stereotype was transformed into the parasite stereotype using the symbol of blood as the central metaphor. In the novel Nevesta hôľ / The Bride of the Ridge Švantner suggests the variant of vampirism, which is further developed in the novel Život bez konca / Life without an End in the sense of „racial impregnation“, i.e. infection and contagion. In the novella Sedliak / The Peasant thematizing his personal experience with persecution of Jews during the World War II, the ambivalent nature of literary antisemitism is refferred to by questioning the victim status of the literary character, who he again portrayed by conforming to the parasite stereotype.

19

Authors: René Bílik

The paper is focused on the ways of thematizing the everyday life, ordinariness and banality in Slovak post-war literature. The poetics of banality is traced within the frameworks of the event poetics, while the event is seen as a problem happening, as an occurrence bound for both the past and the future, as the latent penetrating the sphere of the visual. It shows poetological operations which along with the rise of the doctrine of socialist realism soon after 1948 extracted banalities mainly represented by work and the environment of production, and transposed them from the frameworks of the everyday life into the position of the extraordinary. The essential poetological operation which enabled that „extraction out of the ordinary“ was glorification and heroization of work and its achievements. This moment defined the fundamental lines of Slovak post-war literature for a period of several decades. The paper shows operations that were used to remove the extraordinary tone from the everyday life, notably in the 1960s but especially in the 1980s. The domineering principle in that process is carnivalization, on the level of language in texts as well as the level of syuzhet.

3

Authors: Magdalena Bystrzak

Review

4

Authors: Pavol Koprda

Review

17

Authors: Lenka Rišková

The question of encouraging love for one´s own language as an essential identifying sign of a nation is one of the significant subjects in the poetry of Bohuslav Tablic (1769 – 1832), who did a lot to help stimulate the interest in the original language of the Slovak population as well as in its literary form. Although his literary language is usually superficially described as Czech, it is not accurate as he himself promoted the project of the common literary language for both Slovak and Czech language communities, where Czech and Slovak elements would be applied equally. The choice of his literary language was supported by the three-hundred-year-old tradition of Czech language (also in the Slovak environment), which he regarded as one of the proofs of its full develoment. The analyses of his poetry show that he considered it to be a suitable platform for reflecting on the problems in the society at that time including the issue of language. There are a number of poems in which he appealed to the Slovak society to realize the importance of the language for its life in the multilinguistic Habsburg monarchy. He often called for study of the national language, for its development and refinement mainly through its active use in literary production.

21

Authors: Vladimíra Mravcová

The goal of the paper is to trace motifs and themes found in Pavel Vilikovský´s debut book titled Citová výchova v marci (Sentimental Education in March, 1965) that relate to the category of sensibility. The introduction outlines literary historical conceptualizations of the self and sensibility: sentimentalism, Rousseauesque self, sentimental attitude to the world in the sense as formulated by F. Schiller, sentimental natural line (V. Svatoň). They represent the starting point of the interpretative part where they, as historically unlimited tendencies of literary production, are updated and modified under the influence of modernist poetics and worldview in the context of the 1960s. The subject of the interpretation is thus a reflective process of self-realization. It takes place on the level of body as a sensitive matter, by returning to the elementary, along with searching for authenticity of experience, which is gradually verified through the concept of Romantic illusion: the theme of human self-deception based on the predefined patterns contributes to disillusioned reassessment of sentimental education. The reflection of this shift is linked to modernist elimination of fake sentiment in sensibility (e.g. influence of the Hemingway style in the short story titled Tvoj prvý ston/Your First Moan). The given framework helps show the value hierarchy of emotions and the problem of the ethical conflict between freedom and responsibility for the others.

3

Authors: Jana Števlíková

Review

4

Authors: Marta Fülöpová

Review

10

Authors: Anikó Dušíková

Reconfiguration of Slovak Romanticism, its openness towards the model of literature and art as it was formulated by German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel (1772 – 1829) in the early 19th century, and the unambiguous position of the prose writer Ján Kalinčiak (1822 – 1871) as an author of Romanticism together form space which can be interrelated on the basis of common aesthetic principles to the characteristic features of the works writtern by authors of Hungarian literary Romanticism of the Schlegelian type. This provides space for research into the particularities of the (assumed) interliterary/interlinguistic dialogue. It shows that despite the isolationist form of the foreign-language public spaces of cultures and literatures in Hungary in the 1830s and 1840s the way Ján Kalinčiak and Mihály Vörösmarty handled two selected motifs (wilt and blood revenge) in their texts can be interpreted as a manifestation of the ongoing yet no longer visible process of exchanging information. Also, they can be seen as another proof of the fact that the particularities of the Schlegelian model of Romanticism had a noticeable influence on forming Slovak literature at that time.

13

Authors: Nikola Danišová

The subject of the paper is transcultural comparison of Slovak and foreign-language stories based on the fairy-tale subject about a sister who seeks her brothers turned into animals. According to Aarne-Thompson-Uther´s international catalogue of folktale types, the fairy tales dealing with the subject in question fall into the central motif type 451 The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers. The paper places weight on morphology and iconization of the metamorphosis motif, which is an irreplaceable part of the invariant plot diagram of the fairy-tale subject in question with the aim of finding out what syuzhet and motif constellations include transformations of the characters involved and what (if anything at all) makes depiction of the metamorphosis motif in the Slovak variants of the fairy-tale subject being researched specific in comparison with the foreign equivalents. The sources are constituted by ten fairy tales from all over Slovakia – one authorized record by Pavel Dobšinský and regional versions from Nitra, Trnava, Považská Bystrica, Žilina, Žiar nad Hronom, Trebišov and Humenné, which are mostly compared with the sources from Slavic linguistic and cultural territories (Czech, Bulgarian and Ukrainian fairy tales). The research materials also include a fairy tale The Seven Ravens by the Brothers Grimm, which is in terms of reception one of the best-known European versions of the tale type in question. The variants from the non-Slavic cultural area include a Norwegian fairy tale The Twelve Wild Ducks and a Danish fairy tale The Twelve Ravens, which feature motif elements untypical of the Slavic linguistic and cultural territory in terms of the plot structure.

24

Authors: Dana Hučková

Štefan Krčméry’s (1892 – 1955) wide-ranging interest in art did not concern only lite- rature and music, but also painting and sculpture. In the autumn of 1920, he attended an exposition in the Autumn Salon in Paris about which he informed in an extensive article in the National Newspaper. His aesthetic standpoint was fully determined by the classical perception of the category of the beautiful, which had a negative impact on his aesthetic experience in terms of reception of the modern works. He perceived the modern art as being in the opposition to the tradition, he refused the abstraction, which he did not understand. He stressed the traditionalism, also at the thematic level, and the need of interconnecting the new with the old also in terms of the reflection of the young contemporary Slovak literature. The study refers to S. H. Vajanský’s ideological heritage in Krčméry’s perception of the modern art and literature and its building on such postulates as was the national activism and the emphasis on the positive values, (national) self-confidence, will and optimism, that were characteristic of the supporters of the conservative orientation of the national culture from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

3

Authors: Milan Šišmiš

Review

4

Authors: Katarína Badžgoňová

Review

10

Authors: Veronika Rácová

The paper deals with literary and historical mapping of the beginnings of professional reflection of the textological and editorial stages of pre-production in book publishing in Slovakia. It focuses on the attempts at a theoretical grasp of the subject within a given period of time, i.e. from the 1950s to the early 1960s, which can be regarded as a period of time when this scientific branch was being formed in the Slovak environment. It reflects on three fundamental articles, which were published on this subject by Jozef Felix, Karol Rosenbaum and Mikuláš Bakoš and it shows how the authors mentioned above attempted at an early systematization of the knowledge of the branch although their conclusions were first and foremost based on the practical needs of the editorial pre-production for publishing houses. Therefore, the paper also pays attention to the reasons behind it coming to the conclusion that the beginnings of a more systematic thought given to the editorial pre-production stage in book publishing date back to the creation of an important publishing edition, which was the book series Hviezdoslav Library.

12

Authors: Pavol Matula

The goal of the paper is to show the manifestations and forms of polonophileness of literary historian Stanislav Mečiar (1910 – 1971) in and 1930s. The interwar relations between Czechoslovakia and Poland were tense for almost twenty years. Problems were mainly caused by border disputes in Teschen Silesia, Spiš, Orava and Kysuce, different interests in foreign policy, power competition in the Central European area and attitude towards minorities. In this situation, the interest of young Slovak intelligence in Polish culture and science began to increase in the early 1920s, which was supported by Warsaw, in its efforts to undermine the position of Prague. Stanislav Mečiar, an important literary historian and representative of Matica Slovenska, was one of the young Polonophillic oriented Slovaks. His journey to Polish literature and culture began in the early 1930s, when he went through Professor of Jagiellonian University Władysław Semkowicz, a well-known Slovakophile, on his first scholarship in Zakopane and Krakow. His study trips to Poland continued in the following years, resulting in literary-historical texts and translations published in Slovak periodicals. Later, there was more extensive work on it: Tatras in Slovak and Polish poetry, Hviezdoslav and Kasprowicz and last but not least Poetry and Life. Since the mid-1930s Mečiar, as a representative of Matica slovenská, has maintained close contacts with several personalities of Polish literature and has been intensively involved in the development of Slovak-Polish cultural cooperation. His Polonophillic orientation was not disturbed even by the defeat and occupation of Poland, even though he was an exponent of the regime of the war Slovak Republic, a satellite of Nazi Germany. The paper built on archive materials shows development and forms of Stanislav Mečiar polonophileness.

25

Authors: Mira Nábělková

The paper focuses on mutual reception of literary works and nurture of biliteracy in the Czech and Slovak cultural environments. Attention is paid to the issue of mutual intelligibility of Slovak and Czech in relation to the existence and development of bilingualism and biliteracy as historically changeable phenomena. Alongside the traditional dichotomy between „reading books in original“ and „reading books in translation“, what may be observed in the Czecho-Slovak context is also existence of the third way – reading books in the original language equipped with appended text dictionaries serving as aids in solving potential problems with unknown expressions in literary works. The paper presents specific examples of language management aimed at simultaneous nurture of bilingualism and biliteracy – publishing the requirements and suggestions of text lexicography and editorial pre-production of literary works including appended text dictionaries designed for Czech readers of Slovak literature. Attention is paid to the interwar period marked by intense social negotiations over the optimal interliterary relations.