Po stopách jednej básne... (Interpretácia a exegéza v archívnom výskume)
In the Footsteps of a Poem... (The Interpretation and Exegesis in an Archival Research)

Summary/Abstract: In the study, the author verifies two different interpretations of the poem Dar (The Gift)(1926) by Maša Haľamová (1908 – 1995) based on the inheritance of the poet stored inthe Literary Archive of The Slovak National Library in Martin (an unprocessed fund).In the process of contextualization, she reconstructs the personal history of the poetthrough correspondence, press excerpts, personal documents and specialized literatureand uncovers both her creative beginnings and the genesis of the emblematicpoem in her emotional mishaps. While when published for the first time, the poemcontained also a dedication, in the manuscript form of the collection The Gift andits debut printed version, the dedication was missing in the subtitle. Although theinitials lead to the literary critic Andrej Kostolný, direct (autoreferential) evidencethat the dedication of the poem belonged to him is absent, on the contrary, it is possibleto conclude from the correspondence analysed in detail that it was added onlyon purpose and “additionally”, while the impulse for the one-time indication of theinitials remained unexplained. However, the archival research confirmed one of theinterpretations, namely based on the commentary of the author herself in the radioprogramme from 1967, stating that the poem in question was a love confession toher lover. With respect to the interpretation, it has been confirmed that revealing ofthe relationship of the text and its context for the research purposes also by means ofthe archival research is productive. It allows to reconstruct the genetic links, verifyand confirm the analytical-interpretative conclusions in the process of exegesis, thusachieving certain level of exactitude.

• Details
• Contents