TRI PODOBY POVSTANIA V SLOVENSKEJ DRÁME 1945 – 1949: POVSTANIE AKO ROMANTICKÉ DOBRODRUŽSTVO, KULISA I MOST K BUDÚCNOSTI

Author(s): Veronika Svoradova / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 04/2015

The study focuses on dramatic texts inspired by the Slovak National Uprising which were written in 1945 – 1949, i.e. at a time when the theme of the Uprising was not subject to a politically motivated interpretation. The author briefly introduces individual titles (altogether six dramas), but she focuses primarily on the interpretation and analysis of plays by three authors: Ivan Stodola Básnik a Smrť (The Poet and Death, 1946), Leopold Lahola – Štyri strany sveta (The Four Sides of the World, 1947), Peter Karvaš – Bašta (The Bastion, 1948). She points to the problematic aspects of these plays, as well as to some features which distinguish them from plays by other playwrights writing about the Slovak National Uprising in this period (Rudolf Latečka-Repický, Ján Skalka, Viera Markovičová-Záturecká) and which can be in a sense considered interesting or original. The study also addresses the rise of “the period iconography of the Uprising”, i.e. a set of certain recurrent themes, motifs and methods which occur in works of art depicting the Slovak National Uprising from the period of 1945 – 1949, including film, visual arts and drama.

MEDZI HISTORICKÝM FAKTOM A ESTETICKOU IMAGINÁCIOU

Author(s): Miran Pukan / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 01/2016

Historical plays about the protagonists of the national revival in the 19th century arise from the literary and scholarly ambitions of the Slovak author, playwright, fiction writer, literature and theatre scholar Karol Horák. In basic features, the study characterizes and summarizes the poetological and aesthetic specifics, characteristics and dramatic character of Horák’s works, which focus on both the leaders of the Slovak national movement (Ľudovít Štúr and Jozef Miloslav Hurban) and other players in the events of this period (Jonáš Záborský, Samo Bohdan Hroboň, Janko Kráľ). In the context of Slovak drama the mentioned group of dramas can be read separately, but also as a dynamic historical developmental process of the authorial dramatic method. In the broader sense, they are historical plays, and in the narrower sense, they are unconventional biographical historical plays in which the author values facts and adds nuances, colours and individualizing features to them, which reflect the outer reality and acquire the status of drama essays.

Daniel Krman ako symbol prieniku lokálnej, konfesionálnej a národnej identity (na príklade Myjavy)

Author(s): Peter Macho / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2017

The paper analyzes the importance and place of evangelical bishop Daniel Krman as a symbol in the local (the inhabitants of town Myjava), confessional (Protestants) and national (Slovaks) identity and memory. It examines folk manifestations, literary production and the societies, institutions and public spaces in Myjava that have adopted Krman´s name. The golden age of the institutionalized commemoration of D. Krman may be the first half of the 20th century. To date Krman predominantly functions as a significant confessional symbol, therefore Krmanesque festive culture is also closely related to the clerical and religious life. This symbol was usually pushed out of the context of various secular (public, national) festivals. The literary texts and ceremonial speeches written in the year 1940 (the 200th anniversary of Krman´s death) were marked by the resistance of the Lutheran community to the totalitarian regime of the Slovak State: despite the single attempt at the ecumenical understanding of the symbol, the literary image of Krman as a martyr of the evangelical faith became a tool of petrified confessional differences on the local as well as nationwide level.

Literatúra a jej filmová podoba v stredoeurópskom kontexte

Author(s): Štefan Timko / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2019

„Nová“ skutočnosť a znamenia proti ideológii v literatúre a vo filme: „Tri dcéry“

Author(s): Martina Petríková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2019

Bednár Uher’ s work from the sixties can be regarded as a testimony about a period conditionedby totalitarian ideology and about a man who is confronted with turning moments in history.He increases his human value “only” by life, by the moral value choice, not by submittingto the norms of the system. That is why the screenplay (1968) and the film Three Daughters(1967) are targeted against totalitarianism. The contemporary communist ideology, which“writes the history” with language as an example of socio-cultural pressure, by its symbols asmodels for reality, is confronted with character personalities of the thematic historical sectionthey have formed to the extent that they have different attitudes within individual discourses.In the story of Three Daughters the heroine defends her father and she beats “culture of power”only in the perspective.

World literature and the future of comparative literature from the point of view of the XXII Congress of the AILC/ICLA

Author(s): Anton Pokrivčák,Miloš Zelenka / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

The study is an analysis of the XXII Congress of the AILC/ICLA Literature of the World and the Future of Comparative Literature which took place between July 29 and August 2, 2019 in Macau. As its name indicates, the lectures and workshops emphasised the concept of “literature of the world”, which is considered less elitist than the traditional, and more homogenous, concept of “world literature”. The idea that the (world) literature cannot be approached only from one cultural or theoretical point of view also permeated the joint Czecho-Slovak issue of the journal World Literature Studies entitled “The Image of Remote Countries in the Literatures of Central and Eastern Europe” published on the occasion of the Congress. Using various literary materials, the issue attempted to discuss modern methodological approaches to intercultural problems from the imagological intercontinental perspective.

Reviews

Author(s): Róbert Gáfrik,Natália Rondziková,Eniko Czucz,Eva Kenderessy / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

GÁFRIK, Róbert: PHILIP LEONARD: Orbital Poetics. Literature, Theory, World. RONDZIKOVÁ, Natália: ANDREA RIZZI – BIRGIT LANG – ANTHONY PYM: What is Translation History? A Trust-Based Approach. CZUCZ, Eniko: MAGDOLNA BALOGH (ed.): Szomszédok a kirakatban: A szlovák irodalomrecepciója Magyarországon 1990 után [Neighbors on Display: The Receptionof Slovak Literature in Hungary after 1990]. KENDERESSY, Eva: MARIA SAAS – ŞTEFAN BAGHIU – VLAD POJOGA (eds.): The Cultureof Translation in Romania/Übersetzungskultur und Literaturübersetzenin Rumänien.

Reviews

Author(s): Libuša Vajdová ,Anton Eliáš,Matej Laš,Edita Gromová,Jakub Kapičiak / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

Libuša Vajdová: Antoine Chalvin – Jean-Léon Muller – Katre Talviste – Marie Vrinat-Nikolov (eds): Histoire de la traduction littéraire en Europe médiane. Des origines à 1989 [The History of LiteraryTranslation in Central Europe. From Its Origins to 1989]; Anton Eliáš: Ivana Kupková – Zbyněk Fišer et al.: Jiří Levý: zakladatel československé translatologie [Jiří Levý: The Founder of Czechoslovak Translation Studies]; Matej Laš: Vladimír Biloveský – Ivan Šuša: Banskobystrické myslenie o preklade a tlmočení [Thinkingon Translation and Interpreting in Banská Bystrica]; Edita Gromová: Andrej Zahorák: Intercultural Aspect in Translation and Reception of Precedent Phenomena; Jakub Kapičiak: Gerald Janecek (ed.): Staging the Image: Dmitry Prigov as Artist and Writer

Recenzie

Author(s): Róbert Gáfrik,Kristína Kállay,Adam Bžoch,Jakub Souček,Nikola Danišová / Language(s): Slovak,English Issue: 4/2020

Review of: Ben Hutchinson: Comparative Literature. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xviii + 140 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-880727-8 Charles Sabatos: Frontier Orientalism and the Turkish Image in Central European Literature, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. 183 pp. ISBN 978-1-7936-1487-2 Louis Breger: Dostojevskij. Autor ako psychoanalytik, Prel. Barbora Al Zafari. Bratislava: Vydavateľstvo F, Pro mente sana, 2019. 303 s. ISBN 978-80-88952-99-2; Tomáš Horváth: Medzi invariantom a idiolektom. Detektív, dobrodružstvo, des, Bratislava: Veda, vydavateľstvo SAV, 2020. 432 s. ISBN 978-80-224-1799-0 Mariana Čechová: Ikonizácia pádu a vzostupu (v arcinaratívoch Popoluškinho typu), Bratislava: Veda, vydavateľstvo SAV, 2019. 232 s. ISBN 978-80-224-1793-8

Mýtus o husitsko-evanjelickej kontinuite

Author(s): Martin Braxatoris / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 4/2021

The article focuses on the structure and functions of the myth of the Hussite origin of (a part of) Slovak protestants. The narrative, based on claims of late Middle Ages historians, started gaining momentum in the 18th century and fully developed in the 19th century literary production (especially in the works of Pavol Jozef Šafárik, Samuel Tomášik, several representatives of Romanticism and, later, in the writing of Ladislav Pauliny and Július Botto). During the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, its elements were dismantled on historical, linguistic, architectural and liturgical grounds. Those who contributed to the deconstruction of the myth included František Palacký, Jan Koula, Emil Edgar-Kratochvíl, Pavol Križko or Jozef Škultéty. The work of Branislav Varsik marked a significant break in the dismantling of the fictitious origins of Slovak protestant community. Once the mythological character of the narrative was revealed, it became accessible to analysis from the point of view of mythology, poetics and rituals. Its structure contains such features as separation phase, mythical trials, death, revival and gaining the prize – mythical wedding and settling in the “promised” land. The narrative helps form and maintain a new collective identity: it is invested with explanatory and consecrating functions and serves as a legitimising argument for the identity, religious rituals and cultural customs of the protestant community.

Osvietenstvo a klasicizmus v diele Juraja Rohoňa

Author(s): Michal Babiak / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 5/2023

The poet, national revivalist, folk songs collector, and evangelical pastor Juraj Rohoň (1773 – 1831) was active among Slovaks inhabiting the area of today’s Serbian Vojvodina from 1795 until his death. His literary activity can be reflected in several ways: he was a poet in the Classicist style, author of texts aimed at defending and highlighting the contribution of Slovaks to the social and national life in Hungary, and he also made a significant contribution to the collecting of Slovak folk songs for Ján Kollár’s project Národnie spievanky [National songs]. In all of Rohoň’s works one can find echoes of Enlightenment views and 18th century Enlightenment philosophy. The article analyses the relationship between the impulses of Enlightenment ideas and the literary works in which these impulses resonate and points to the overlap of the tendencies in question towards pre-Romanticism, focusing on works that highlight the category of the nation and also on the question of the historical development and presence of Slovaks/Slavs in history.

Janko Kráľ v komemoratívnej praxi 20. storočia

Author(s): Dana Hučková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 5/2023

In the culture of remembrance concerning the authors of Slovak Romantic literature, the poet Janko Kráľ (1822 – 1876) holds a distinctive position. Even though his oeuvre was not published in book form during his life and his last resting place remains unknown, since the 1920, his name and literary heritage have been gradually gaining a stable position in the Slovak literature as an independent topos. Mechanisms of the creation of literary representations of Janko Kráľ in which the character of references also depended on the choice of the genre can be defined as a process in several stages: rescuing the poet from oblivion (Vladimír Roy – poem dedicated to the centenary of the poet’s death, 1922) interpretation (Štefan Krčméry – speech at the unveiling of the memorial plaque on the house in which J. Kráľ was born, 1924), updating (Laco Novomeský – review of the volume Ňeznáme básňe Janka Kráľa [Janko Kráľ’s unknown poems], 1938), ideological narratives (speeches at the transfer of the remains of the poet to the national cemetery in Martin, 1940) – inspiration (Milan Rúfus, interpretive essay, 1976). These examples of remembrance practice connected with J. Kráľ outline the processes of familiarisation and canonisation. The transformations are reactions to the period social contexts, but also reflect the dynamics of cultural memory.

Medzi Slovenskom, Juhosláviou a Srbskom – obraz vojvodinskej slovenskej komunity v slovenských a srbských politických naráciách v 19. – 21. storočí

Author(s): Juraj Marušiak,Sanja Zlatanović / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 6/2023

The article examines the dynamics of the formation of the image of the Slovak community in Vojvodina in Slovak and Serbian political narratives from the 19th century to the present. It focuses on how its differences manifest in the (Czecho-)Slovak and Yugoslav (Serbian) context. The first part of the article explores the nationalising processes among the members of the Slovak community in present-day Vojvodina from the 19th century till the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. The following parts are devoted to the position of the Slovak minority in Vojvodina in the conditions of the Yugoslav state in the interwar period, as well as its relations with the Czechoslovak Republic. The article also deals with the position of this community during the Second World War, in socialist Yugoslavia and after its dissolution in the early 1990s in the context of inter-state relations, but also the dynamics of intra-ethnic interactions. The paper draws on the symbolic interactionism approach, i.e. the shaping of mutual perceptions along and across ethnic boundaries and through intra-ethnic integration and differentiation practices.

Mýtický naratív sťahovania a domova v slovenskej vojvodinskej literatúre

Author(s): Zuzana Čížiková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 6/2023

Even though the historical narrative of the (mythical) migration of Slovaks to the Vojvodina (the so called Dolná zem – “Low Land”) and the founding of a new home is based on historical facts, it contains a range of relatively stable elements of a transnationally shared myth of the search for a promised land. This myth represents one of the key memories of the Slovak minority in Serbia, shaped and maintained across time, which contributed to the creation of national unity, a distinct image, and a specific Slovak identity. The paper primarily examines qualitatively varying literary texts in Vojvodina Slovak literature of the 20th century in which this myth and related thematic and expressive means dominate. These thematic and motivic paradigms include motifs of migration, flatland, land, building a house, ancestors, and others, often portrayed in comparison to what things were like in the old homeland. These, through systematic repetition in many works of fiction and non-fiction, contributed to the construction of the myth of the promised land and the finding of a second homeland which became part of the collective memory of Vojvodina Slovaks. In this sense, one can also speak of the historical and cultural memory of the Vojvodina Slovak ethnic group and the building of a distinctive Vojvodina – “Lowland” – Slovak identity.

Dve ukážky funerálnej kultúry zo srbskej Vojvodiny

Author(s): Erika Brtáňová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 6/2023

In the “lowland” environment, within the territory of present-day Serbian Vojvodina, remarkable literary texts associated with the contemporary funeral culture emerged in the 19th century. The first example is the mourning poem by Juraj Rohoň (1773 – 1831), which he wrote during his time in Hložany and delivered at the funeral of Senior Ondrej Stehla in February 1818. This manuscript composition is evidence of an elegiac genre adapted to the church environment, characterized by classicist elevation and imagery. The first collection of funeral speeches composed by Slovak Evangelical preacher Ján Kutlík senior (1806 – 1890), published as Pohřebník aneb Kázně a řečí pohřební ([The mourner or Funeral sermons and speeches], 1852), was also written in Vojvodina. Kutlík worked as a teacher and later a preacher in Stara Pazova, where he likely began conceptualising his first funeral speeches, which became the basis for the collection he published in Sarvaš. In his model speeches addressed to young preachers, he emphasises spiritual counselling and consolation for the bereaved. Through presented insights into education, enlightenment, patriotism, and the composition of sermons, Kutlík’s preaching shares many commonalities with the preaching of Ján Kollár.

Pre lásku lacanovskú (a básnickú): Feminizmy, psychoanalýza a básnický výskum subjektu a tela v debute Nóry Ružičkovej Mikronauti

Author(s): Ivana Hostová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

The essay provides a new reading of the debut collection of poems by the experimental poet and conceptual artist Nóra Ružičková (b. 1977). After outlining the way the feminist thought entered Slovak academic and literary discourse in the 1990s, the article conducts a Lacanian reading of chosen elements of the poet’s first collection of poems Mikronauti ([Micronauts] 1998). The essay starts from a reading of several of Ružičková’s poems published in the Slovak (and Czech) feminist periodical Aspekt (1993 – 2004) in 1997 and then moves on to discussing the way the collection was read through the prism of feminist theory (Hélène Cixous and her concept of écriture féminine). The article then provides a close reading of a poem addressing the issue of women’s writing. The last section of the essay discusses the research of the body and the subject with regards to interiority and exteriority and the visual means of expression in Lacan (topology) and Ružičková who also illustrated her collection of poems. In its concluding remarks, the essay proposes to conceptualise Ružičková’s writing as research-based poetry.

Umiestnenie každej častice je len dočasné. Procesuálnosť v poézii Kataríny Kucbelovej

Author(s): Viliam Nádaskay / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 3/2024

The article focuses on the second book of poetry by Katarína Kucbelová (b. 1979) Šport ([Sport] 2006). The collection portrays the world as an ongoing process which transforms everything – living and inanimate, abstract and concrete. The processual character of the world in Sport focuses specifically on the body. The reading outlined in the article handles processuality in connection with themes, motifs, and philosophy of life, deriving the essential points of thinking about corporeality from phenomenology. Since Kucbelová’s poetry often refers to the principles of visual and conceptual art, a similar interpretive procedure can be applied to the reading of her writing: her poems connote various spheres of life and in the creative process, she combines these into a more or less unified thought world. Interpretive directions thus variously rely on the idea of processuality and develop it artistically: these encompass such areas as conceptual art, phenomenology, meditation, biology, or somatic aesthetics. Broadly, these insights can be applied to the author’s first three books of poetry, which can be laboriously described as a processual trilogy, since they all manifest an approach to the various spheres of life as processes.

Bozkávanie s nahým Novomeským (Interpretačná sonda nepublikovanej kapitoly z knihy Janka Silana Dom opustenosti)

Author(s): Andrej Gejdoš / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2025

Janko Silan (1914 – 1984) did not live to see the publication of his novel House of Abandonment. Although he actively pursued its publication, especially between 1970 and 1974, the text could not be published during the period of normalisation in the totalitarian Czechoslovakia. The work was officially made available to readers only after the socio-political changes of 1989, first in 1991 and later in an expanded edition in 1997. Even though he was unable to publish the book, Silan continued writing, adding further chapters to the novel. This corpus of texts is preserved in his literary estate in the Literary Archive of the Slovak National Library in Martin under the title House of abandonment – unpublished chapters of the novel. Among these texts is a previously unpublished fragment When we entered there…, which is unique in the context of the works of Slovak Catholic modernists as it explores the theme of two people of the same gender kissing, both of whom were prominent figures in the literary life of the time (the author of the text Janko Silan and the poet Laco Novomeský). This article aims to interpret the text, particularly through the lens of the cultural perception of the kiss and to outline certain aspects of the relationship between Silan and Novomeský.

Špecifiká irónie v románovej tvorbe Rudolfa Slobodu

Author(s): Romana Antalová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2025

Irony is not a simple semantic polarization – it touches on all aspects of a literary text, places them in a state of flux and creates additional layers of meaning. One of its variations is so-called romantic irony, characterized by the tension between the ideal and reality, where the resulting “superstructural” layer of meaning essentially expresses a sense of restlessness or disquiet. This type of irony is also marked by the re-evaluation of the high and the low. Romantic irony was employed by the prose writer Rudolf Sloboda (1938 – 1995). The article examines the specifics of the irony that can be observed in the novels Narcis (Narcissus, 1965) and Rozum (Reason, 1982). It focuses primarily on the contradictions in the expectations and actions of the protagonists, which are common to both novels. The article also considers the use of parabase, which, in combination with the fragmentary nature of the text, leads to a weakening of narrativity – one of the fundamental characteristics of Sloboda’s novelistic work. Another aspect analysed is the subversive effect of irony.

Hľadanie šedej zóny v slovenskej sci-fi literatúre obdobia normalizácie

Author(s): Olha Norba / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2025

This article analyses the phenomenon of the grey zone as a space for alternative expression in Slovak literature during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. It connects the emergence and expansion of this grey zone to the gradual ideological erosion of the communist system during the late normalisation period. The article locates the expression of social critique within the realm of the sci-fi genre, which allowed authors to escape into fantastical worlds without severing ties to real-world conditions. In conveying their moral concerns, authors employed not only escapist strategies of subversion, but also conformist motifs designed to legitimise their messages within official discourse. The dystopian genre was frequently utilized, characterized by pronounced catastrophism, scepticism, and anti-illusionism. Prominent themes included environmental pollution, warnings against the loss of humanity, calls for peace, fear of nuclear catastrophe, and condemnation of power domination and totalitarian rhetoric. Searching for the grey zone in Slovak sci-fi literature of the normalisation period proved to be an effective way to re-evaluate the traditional black-and-white vision of society, which was viewed as divided into the “fighting dissent” and the masses blindly accepting the ruling regime.