V súmraku Mila Urbana
In the Twilight of Milo Urban

Summary/Abstract: The goal of the paper is an analytical and interpretatory reflection on Urban´s short story V súmraku/In the Twilight/ from the collection titled Výkriky bez ozveny (Screams without Echos, 1928). The interpretation was written with the ambition to contribute to the literary and scientific corpus dedicated to Urban´s literary work with regard to various text forms of his short story published in the years 1928, 1943 and 1965, and also to comment on the parallels between the short story in question and Russian literature (Dostoyevsky, Andreyev). The resources used for writing the paper include the editions of the short story: the original edition of the collection of novellas was provided by Báčki Petrovac library, the later ones are widely available. The literary and scientific resources included writings by experts of Urban´s literary work (Koli, Rakús, Števček), whose findings are related to the subject and the goal of the paper.The comparison of the editions of the short story In the Twilight from the years 1928, 1943 and 1965 helped discover the tendency to weaken the explicitness by making the expressions more and more vague and by reducing the narrator´s comments, as well as to increase the suspense in the short story through the reduction mentioned above and the tendency to strengthen the lyric and vivid elements in the text. The nature of the contrasts on the syntanctic and semantic levels was described in order to clarify the way of creating the tension-and-ease arc employed in the short story. The presence of the allusions to Russian literature was demonstrated by including the quotations from the literary works dealing with the creation of characters in the situation of a murderer´s inner drama (Andreyev), the similarity between the literary works of Urban and Dostoyevsky was presented by comparing the outer motifs (the image of beating a horse, an axe as a murder weapon) as well as the inner ones (the motive for the crime, the breaking point of the conflict with God). The paper is supposed to enrich the literary and scientific reflection on Urban´s literary work. The in-depth interpretation of the structure of the short story In the Twilight contributes to the research into Urban´s poetics.

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