Brat alebo utláčateľ: dôvody a dôsledky mimoriadnej pozície Rusa v slovenskej vojnovej literatúre
The Brother or the Oppressor: Reasons and Consequences of the Extraordinary Position of the Russian in Slovak War Literature

Summary/Abstract: Russophilia and Slavism, i.e. the love of Russia and its culture and at the same time the reliance on the firmness and power of this biggest Slavic state and protector of the Slavic language family, are views deeply rooted in the Slovak past. In literature, this attitude of the small Slovak nation towards great Russia was not challenged until the World War I and the Great October Revolution. As some Slovak writers (e.g. J. Jesenský, J. Gregor Tajovský, J. Augusta, M. Gacek) took part in the war on the Eastern Fronts, whether they wanted or not, the Slovaks’ traditional views of Russia were contradicted with their harsh war and revolution experiences. During the inter-war period the young generation refused the older conservative branch of Slovak culture (which was also a bearer of the Russophile principles), and systematically gained inspiration from modern Western culture. The interest in Russia and its culture was revived, when a new German military threat was beginning to appear in the late 1930s. The powerful and selfless Russian brother became part of the range of the literary characters again. The Russians (Soviets) were schematically depicted, without conflicts and doubts, especially by the Communist writers. The authors from other political and ideological parties and groups sought within the Russian liberator a human per se, a human with positive and negative traits, who found himself in real contacts and formed particular relationships with the local people. In this way some interesting personal profiles of the Russian man, whose actions and behaviour were set in the context of the whole of Russian culture, were created. Here František Švantner’s work needs mention. Nevertheless, the schematical, black-and-white pattern was compulsory to follow for the whole of the official literature produced in Slovakia from the year 1948 on after the Communist regime had been forcefully established. This includes the books by Peter Jilemnický and Vladimír Mináč. Only after 1956, Alfonz Bednár, Ladislav Mňačko, Rudolf Jašík and Vincent Šikula offered more complicated characters of the Russians and Russia. But the Russian ideal failed. The politics of the Soviet Union in the after-war decades were not considered peaceful and humane by many citizens of Czechoslovakia. Many Slovaks were deported to the Soviet concentration camps, so called gulags. Such tragedies were depicted by Pavol Rankov, Pavel Vilikovský and others. Our heuristic and interpretative paper is focused on the character of the Russain in war-themed literature, because a war stresses ideological, political, social, cultural and literary features and contexts of the literary heroes. Keeping in mind various contexts, the study compares the literary characters in the chronological order, which automatically raises a critical approach as to the reflection of the Russian in Slovak literature.

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