Kollár, Petrarca a Dante
Kollár, Petrarch, and Dante

Summary/Abstract: By way of introduction the author demonstrates first the Petrarchan and then (for the last two sonnets, published in the 1832 edition) Dantean inspiration of the cycle Slávy dcera by the Slovak-born poet Jan Kollár, and points out the incompatibility of the two models. He describes Kollár’s reading of Petrarch and Dante (both in German translation) as partial, since he used only selected elements of form and motif. Kollár’s appreciation of the two Italian poets was undoubtedly not without reservations: on the basis of a passage from a description of Kollár’s journey to northern Italy in 1841, the author of the article concludes that the distanced way Kollár talks about his models reveals criticism of them from Protestant and Panslav positions. Kollár was nevertheless able to assess positively his contact with Petrarch and Dante: if it was the Petrarchan sonnet that taught him concise, semantically rich expression, it was the stylistic openness of Dantean “realism,” which led him to experiment with form in the framework of a heroic-comic genre.

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