Od rozprávok k alegórii národného života (Ku konštituovaniu alegórie zakliatej krajiny v slovenskom romantizme)

Author(s): Jana Pácalová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2017

The paper is concerned with establishing the allegory of a cursed country in Slovak Romanticism, which is one of the defining signs in the works by the poets of the so-called Levoča School, however, their sphere of action was actually (as it is demonastrated in the material processed) considerably wider. The goal of the paper is to show when, in what way and through what mechanisms an originally neutral and general term, which was and still is an integral part of the language schemes (in the general sense, featuring a potentially implicit reference to the Bible – a curse), has transformed to one of the defining motifs of the Romantic topics, what way, in what forms and functions, it has become part of the mythic and poetic image (simile, symbol, allegory) and what mechanisms made it possible for the term to develop a form of one of the Slovaks´ best-known national myths.

Vilikovského pátranie po skutočnosti: Fotografia a trpkastá príchuť skutočného

Author(s): Tomáš Horváth / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2017

The paper interprets the radical way of rewriting the detective fiction in the short story by Pavel Vilikovský Celkový pohľad na Máriu B. (The Overall View of Maria B., 1968) and in his novel Prvá veta spánku (The First Sentence of Sleep, 1983). The two texts are in a mutual relation of variants, while their intertextual illumination generates more meanings. In the short story the narrator tells the whole story in the modality of possibility. Several events of the narrative structure are of an ontic nature. The text of the short story only provides the reader with one side of the communication process of investigation – the sender, the detective asking questions, i.e. the text offers the base of the evidence, not the core. The veil of the detective´s hypotheses conceals or at least obscures the reality – and the detective has to use simple existential statements in order to ensure what is real. Here the detective becomes a machine to generate hypotheses about the reality after the reality (the past murder) has disappeared. The novel Prvá veta spánku is disappointing in terms of genre expectations raised by itself – a seemingly detective novel becomes a novel featuring an external perpetrator. This genre method is motivated by the composition structure itself – the trifold consecutive focalization of the narration and two fake solutions. The criminal solution of the case is enabled by the unexpected abduction of the detective: the scene of crime and the weather – the remote stone-pit during the rain – help the detective draw the conclusion as to the fundamental characteristic of the perpetrator.

Trhliny v česko-slovenské vzájemnosti koncem 19. století na příkladu cestopisu Terézie Vansové

Author(s): Jana Pátková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2017

The form of Czech-Slovak mutuality had during the 19th century monolithic character. On the example of travelogue literature in the 19th and the 20th centuries, among other things we can see the difficult historical situation in Slovakia was located then. Terézia Vansová in her travelogue Pani Georgiadesová na cestác/Ms Georgiadesová’s traveling) subtitled Veselý cestopis do Prahy na národopisnú výstavu (1896 – 1897)/Happy travelogue to Prague on an ethnographic exhibition (1896 – 1897)) captures this transformation, along with the transformation of literary and socio-historical code. From the typological point of view in this travelogue an obvious yaw from hitherto in travelogue genre. Selection of a fictional narrator instead of the author’s point of view and a female optics story appears in the development of Slovak literature as new one. The author, through a fictional narrator Johanna Georgiadesová thematises mutual (Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech) ignorance of culturally and historically closest land. Journey to the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition held in 1895, occupies a central place in the travelogue and meant for Vansová despite thematisation cracks also strengthening of national self-confidence.

Nábožensko-ľudovýchovný aspekt vo vecnej literatúre Slovákov v Rumunsku

Author(s): Patrik Šenkár / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2017

The goal of the paper is to address the continuous existence of Slovak national culture outside the physical borders of the mother land. The readers are introduced into the subject of the complex evolution of the Slovaks living in the then Romanian Kingdom / Romania, especially in the first half of the 20th century. The objective and subjective interpretation reflects on the religious and didactic aspect in factual literature written by the Slovaks living in Romania by presenting two original writings which had (have) an important role and function in the social – cultural – literary development (i.e. they are a kind of stimuli for the national identity and self-preservation). The study contains particular extracts of the originals or metatexts written by experts in the given field, which help „illustrate“ the atmosphere of that period as well as the creative stimuli for this national minority within a wider context. The outcome and the contribution of the paper are seen in informing the people interested in the subject of the fact that the Slovak element „has pulsated with life“ not only below the Tatras but also further south.

Medzinárodný workshop Prolegomena k poetike slovenskej literatúry po roku 1945

Author(s): Daniel Domorák / Language(s): Slovak,Czech Issue: 2/2017

Štefan Drug – lektor slovenského jazyka a prekladateľ poľskej literatury. Spomienka

Author(s): Maria Papierz / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 5/2017

The paper summarizes Štefan Drug´s activities at the Jagellonian University in Krakow between the years 1969 and 1974, where he worked as the first lecturer of Slovak langauge and literature. The new course of Slovak studies was established in Krakow in 1968 thanks to Danuta Abrahamowicz (1937 – 1995). Štefan Drug was not only involved in the pedagogical activities but also in promoting Slovak culture and literature in Poland, developing the mutual Slovak-Polish relations as well as translating activities. He formed the generation of the first Polish Slovak language experts.

Libreto ako náčrt dejín – Štefan Drug a expozícia Literatúra medzi dvoma vojnami (1968)

Author(s): Ján Gavura / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 5/2017

In 1968 a literary critic Štefan Drug was commissioned to take a part in an exhibition covering Slovak literature since the beginning to contemporary times. He prepared a period of interwar literature which had been a matter of numerous deformations during 1950s and partly 1960s, however, he presented the period with respect to its variety and aesthetic achievements so, eventually, it became a precise and concise outline of literary history, probably the most precise one at that time. Drug used to his advantage the form of an exhibition so he can make the presentation not only vivid but also flexible with latest available sources of research. In the outline he was able to return some authors banned from official literature and correct the image of others that had been altered in favour of political engagement of the Communist establishment. Even nowadays, fifty years from the exhibition itself, Drug’s outline is an example of deep understanding of the Slovak literature written in the interwar period, with only minor corrections needed.

Časopis DAV očami Štefana Druga (nad knihou DAV a davisti)

Author(s): Karol Csiba / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 5/2017

The paper is written in the form of comments on the book DAV a davisti/DAV and Davists by Štefan Drug. Within the purview of the author´s chronological reconstruction of how the magazine DAV was published, I make an attempt to follow the linear time axis, from which I choose several kye moments. These are marginally confronted with the contemporary reader´s perspective. It shows that the character of the historical overview of the individual volumes enters into the relationship with the up-to-date literary and historical premises. Despite the historical determinations the key point in the present paper lies in reading Štefan Drug. It is dominated by the view of revealing the author´s open as well as concealed assessments of the contributions to this interwar social and cultural periodical. What is even more significant in my paper is his stated effort to adopt the documentary approach to the individual volumes and editions of the magazine. Štefan Drug uses them to summarize a number of the topics and goals of the whole DAV group, which can be seen from the contemporary viewpoint as one of the ways how to at least partly ensure them a more adequate place in the interwar Slovak cultural and social life.

Idylické ako symptóm (v naratívnej štruktúre textov slovenského literárneho realizmu)

Author(s): Milan Kendra / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2018

The study aims to approach the idyllic within the context of realistic representation not as a category represented by strictly specified group of idyllic means of expression but rather a stylistic layer in which variability of expression plays a major role. The study focuses on particular examples of authorial metalepsis and intrusions of extradiegetic narrator which undermines mimetic illusion of realistic narrative and, as a result, the inventedness of the story and the idyllic nature of the narrative are foregrounded. Several examples extracted from various genres (a travelogue, a short story, a sketch) and authors (G. K. Zechenter-Laskomerský, M. Kukučín and S. H. Vajanský) of Slovak literary realism are given to demonstrate the shifts from the realistic to the idyllic caused by the metaleptic quality of narrative embedding. The communicative value and the effect of the idyllic is determined by the technique how the narrative is integrated into the context of complex literary expression. The change of functional perspective from the realistic to the idyllic in the fiction concerned is signalled by the symptom of anachronism considered illegitimate in temporal and causal system of realistic depiction. The symptom challenges its epistemological and educational function and in the study it is evaluated as the expression of desire for transgression of relations of successiveness and equivalence, logic and causality of objective, external necessity typical of literary techniques of the period.

Idyla a limity realizmu

Author(s): Marcela Mikulová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2018

The idealistic and idyllic perception of reality in Slovak literature of the second half of the 19th century was seen as a legitimate part of the production of the old generation writers. The falsified image of reality was challenged by the production of the younger authors (Timrava, Tajovský, Jesenský). It their case it was enough to describe undestorted reality to seem polemic, i.e. anti-idyllic in contrast to the old generation of the writers. However, there was a writer who found himself split between the desire for a harmonious world and critical perception of reality – Martin Kukučín. Encouraged by the discussions in the Prague society Detvan he managed to benefit from the stimuli of European literature finding the basis for his philosophical reflections in the fundamental premises – the question of life and death, conscience, egoism, tradition, spiritual harmony and money. On the island of Brač in 1896 he began to write a long work of fiction inspired by observations of a local patrician family (the fragments were titled by the Complete Works editors Rodina/Family and Zádruha/Community) with the intention to describe a family idyll, harmony and togetherness. He was very disappointed to discover that the only thing that kept the aging childless siblings together was the wealth, which in line with the family tradition of not dividing the property had no actual heir. Kukučín was disgusted by the realistic depiction of the archaic traditions so much that the text, which he failed to write in an appropriate artistic form for that reason, remained in manuscript. Having had this experience as well as been disappointed by the time spent in Slovakia he wrote in 1896 a short story titled Svadba/Wedding. He did it in a vivid and emotional form of eclogue, and he used its lyric nature to a great extent as his emotional prophylaxis. The protagonist´s painful polarity between love for the parents and that for a woman suggests an analogy with the writer´s feelings when he realized he never wanted to come back to his homeland again.

HÁJKOVÁ, Dagmar – HORÁK, Pavel – KESSLER, Vojtěch – MICHELA, Miroslav (eds.): SLÁVA REPUBLICE! OFICIÁLNÍ SVÁTKY A OSLAVY V MEZIVÁLEČNÉM ČESKOSLOVENSKU

Author(s): Katarína Cupanová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2019

VOJTECH, Miloslav: SLOVENSKÁ KLASICISTICKÁ A PREROMANTICKÁ LITERATÚRA

Author(s): Libuša Bednáriková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2019

ZAMBOR, Ján: STAVEBNOSŤ BÁSNE

Author(s): Ľubica Hroncová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2019

Modernizmus v slovenskej literatúre 1900 – 1948

Author(s): Katarína Badžgoňová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2019

Kalinčiak v Uhorsku – motív ako signál kontextu

Author(s): Anikó Dušíková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2020

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.

Jazyk ako básnická téma Bohuslava Tablica

Author(s): Lenka Rišková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2020

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.

Naratívne postupy v Belových Vedomostiach o Tekovskej stolici

Author(s): Jozef Kordoš / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2021

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 who 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), a 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.

K novým cestám Hlbinovej poézie

Author(s): Peter Tollarovič / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2021

The paper deals with the poetry of Pavol Gašparovič Hlbina written in the second half of the 1930s, when the author was one of the most productive Slovak poets, reviewers, translators and literary aestheticians. It traces the causes of changes in his poetics used especially in the collection of poems Dúha (The Rainbow, 1937) and also his relations to his close collaborator Rudolf Dilong (1905 – 1986), mainly in the context of their editorial activities in the magazines associated with Catholic Modernism (Postup a Prameň). It outlines the author´s poetry in the context of Slovak modification of poetism and maps his views on surrealism. When the collection Dúha (The Rainbow, 1937) was published, Hlbina was closely following the rising surrealist tendencies in the Slovak literary environment and writing numerous reflections on them. This collection of poems also represents the modern variant of his poetry. The other variant is religious poetry; this type of poetics was used when cooperating on an extensive project of St Adalbert Association, which was the Unified Catholic Hymnbook published in 1937.

Obraz Bratislavy v pamätiach a publicistike Mila Urbana

Author(s): Karol Csiba / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2021

The article looks at the ways Bratislava is portrayed in Milo Urban’s (1904 – 1982) memoirs and journalistic texts. It starts with the reflection of an essay published in the mid-1930s in Elán magazine and continues with an analysis of the topographic outline of the city presented in the second and third part of Urban’s memoirs. The latter texts provide a look at the city from the point of view of a stranger, newcomer. The descriptions give an insight into the emotional state of the narrator and his view of Bratislava, characterised by his exclusion from the social space of the city. The texts also contain musings on urban imagination. Common attributes of all analysed texts lie in the confrontation of modernisation with Slovak tradition. The article also outlines the possibilities of further research into Urban’s work through the analysis of urban topoi: the formerly unfamiliar Bratislava gradually becomes a known and natural space – although this process is a problematic and not finite one.

Gizela Gáfriková (ed.): Hugolín Gavlovič a jeho dielo v dobovom literárnom a kultúrnom kontexte

Author(s): Peter Ruščin / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2014

Review of: Gáfriková, Gizela (ed.): Hugolín Gavlovič a jeho dielo v dobovom literárnom a kultúrnom kontexte. Zborník príspevkov z medzinárodnej vedeckej konferencie 12. – 13. novembra 2012 v Bratislave. Bratislava : Ústav slovenskej literatúry SAV, 2013, 268 s. ISBN 978-80-88746-21-8.