Magický realizmus v slovenskej literatúre: slovo, pojem, smer…
Magic realism in Slovak literature: word, concept, movement…

Appropriation of the term via receptive practice, reflection and production until the early 1990s

Summary/Abstract: The paper is a reconstruction of how the meaning of the concept “magic realism” transformedin Slovak literary practice and reflection from the end of World War II to the early 1990s.The meaning of magic realism as defined in contemporary literary theory (the literary theoryconcept as well as the movement term) is not quite identical to every use of the expressionin domestic reflection on literature. It was flexibly used by Jozef Felix as early as 1946 whendiscussing contemporary prose as a counterpart of the lyric tendencies, which he criticized.Magic realism returned to Slovak literature as a denomination of one of the components ofcomplex modern Latin American prose, i.e. the corpus of works of Latin American provenancewhich became popular in Europe during the 1960s. The comeback of the term waspreceded by the reception of the most significant works by Latin American prose writers(Carpentier, Asturias, Cortázar, Fuentes, García Márquez…), which were becoming moreaccessible in Czech and Slovak translations at the turn of the 1960s. In the early 1980s theterm was partly used by literary criticism in the context of Peter Jaroš’s novel Tisícročná včela(A Thousand-year-old Bee) and its relations to the work of Gabriel García Márquez. Until 1989wider use of the term was limited by the ideology of the period, according to which magicrealism could endanger the position of socialist realism as the official literary doctrine of thetime.

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