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.

The archaic strata of the linguistic image of the world (on the basis of Slovenian and Slovak magic formulae)

Author(s): Mária Zsilák / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2013

It is the theoretical background of the linguistic image of the world that serves as a base to the author to present Slovenian and Slovak magic formulae as the archaic strata of the language. She has chosen texts of the same type from the scope of Slovenian and Slovak peasants’ way of healing. The Slovak texts were collected by the author at the end of the 20th century, while the Slovenian texts which were set down earlier are quoted from Vinko Möderndorfer’s work. Apart from the common Central European attitude, the author also points out the unique, national, and linguistic features, all reflected by the linguistic image of the world.

Die Gestalt Jánošíks, des Gebirgsburschen, in der slowakischen Folklore und Literatur (1740–1820)

Author(s): Anna Gyivicsán / Language(s): German Issue: 1(2)/2007

Predominantly, this study examines two issues. First, why in a very short span of time the real historical person of Jánošík turned into a folklore and literary character and what kind of interaction can be revealed between these two fields. Second, why compared to the whole of the Slovakian folklore the Jánošík tradition is so scarce in Slovakian communities of Hungary. The author also attempts to answer to the question how the Jánošík legends attested in these communities appeared among the Slovakians who settled down in Hungary in the late 17th and early 18th century.

Dejiny slovenskej literatúry a srbská Vojvodina. Dva vojvodinské katechizmy a latinská ekloga Beata Bacska

Author(s): Erika Brtáňová,Oľga Vaneková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 03+04/2018

The goal of the paper is to show that Lower-land Vojvodina (Northern Serbia), which was inhabited in the second half of the 18th century by Slovak evangelicals of the Augsburg confession for economic and religious reasons, was an enviroment where specific literary culture was created being mainly based on religious and educational literature. It focuses on one of the significant manifestations of this sort of literature, i. e. catechism production, which features two characteristic lines: the original domestic catechism (Matej Ambrózi Jádro náboženství křesťanského ku prospěchu evangelických konfirmantů/The Core of Christian Religion to the Benefit of Evangelical Confirmands, 1844) and the adaptation of a translation of a foreign (German) catechism (Leopold Abafi – Heinrich Wendel: Výklad malého katechismu D. Martina Luthera/ The interpretation of Dr Martin Luther´s Small Catechism, 1870). The second part of the article deals with occasional print by Michal Godra (1801-1874) Carmen pastoricium (Novi Sad, 1841). The paper focuses on the first of two eclogues titled Beata Bacska. Ecloga I. (Blessed Báčka, eclogue I.), which is composed of 97 lines written in hexameter. The article includes a transcription of the Latin text, a prosaic translation into Slovak and the interpretation of its themes and motifs.

Kultúra a národ v politickom myslení Svetozára Hurbana Vajanského. Analýza ich vzťahu vo vybra ch článkoch Národných ný novín

Author(s): Marcel Martinkovič / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2013

This paper brings closer the relationship of the culture and the national existence in the political thinking of Svetozár Hurban Vajanský. The examined material is primary delimited by the articles of S. H. Vajanský in Národné noviny. In the work is analysed the primordialistic and holistic looking of S. H. Vajanský at the existence of the nation and the meaning of the folk culture. In this context is more closely analysed the relationship of the nationally conscious intelligence and the folk as well as the relationship of the nation and the state. In this connection, Vajanský defines and promotes the concept based on the original Štúr´s idea of unity in various things.The ambivalence of the political thinking of Vajanský is shown mainly in the fact that he claims the principle of the organic plurality and the cultural tolerance selectively, only on the outside of the national-emancipatory activities. Within the frame of the Slovak political discursus, he asserts the idea of the programmatic and strategic uniformity, which consequently becomes the source of the cultural and political privilegionalism and isolationism. This fact is in parallel complemented with the reflection of the original acultural meaning of the national elity for the development of the national awareness of the folk. The folk is known in the context of the principle of primordialism and Herder´s romantism as an entity, which is the holder of the cultural merits of the national identity.

Dieťa vo svete trpiacich alebo Interpretačné prieniky do próz Júliusa Barča-Ivana (Cirkus a Veľké tajomstvo)

Author(s): Martina Petríková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 27-28/2016

In this paper we deal with selected motifs (of child, suffering, cicrus, guilt…) in the artistic text of Július Barč-Ivan, which is connected with the context of eastern Slovakia and which was formed by ideology, as well as socio-political situation of the first Czechoslovak Republic. We choose the Barč-Ivan's proses, which thematises the „story‟ of character determined by dark sides of reality and in which the choosen motifs are presented through the artistic means and methods „from the interface‟ of expressionism and existentialism. Barč-Ivan's literary works fulfill not only an aesthetic function, but also other functions, as they benefit from the difficult family or socio-political, or socially conditioned situation.

Słowacka proza naturyzmu w polskich przekładach — strategie wyboru i translacji w zmieniającej się perspektywie kulturowej drugiej połowy XX wieku

Author(s): Marta Buczek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2018

The author of the article analyses Polish translations of the Slovak naturalist prose which is a very interesting phenomenon at the primary horizon and appears to be the most frequently translated into Polish. The author concentrates on the representative translations, strategies for selection and strategies for translation of the naturalism in the changing cultural perspective of the second half of the twentieth century. Historical and cultural situation, historical distance between the originals and their translations has the biggest influence for the selection of the texts but also for the strategies the translators choose during the process of translation. In the perspective of cultural and literature turn in Poland in 1956, the Slovak naturalist prose had the chance to appear in the second horizon but it did not affect recipients and did not have the possibility to impact the development of the receiving literature. The author of the article tries to answer the question why it did not happen.

ZWISCHEN DEM EIGENEN UND DEM FREMDEN. ZUR MIGRATIONSERFAHRUNG BEI MELINDA NADJ ABONJI UND IRENA BREŽNÁ

Author(s): Marijana Jeleč,Nada Popović / Language(s): German Issue: 25/2018

Current developments in German-language literature show how much literature is shaped by social changes. In the past, Germanlanguage literature has repeatedly reported on waves of emigration and refugee movements, and that's what it does today. The refugee problem is therefore also in the literature a recurring theme. Contemporary authors from the German-speaking countries such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoğlu, Ilija Trojanow, Catalin Dorian Florescu or Abbas Khider, who experienced migration for a variety of reasons, are proof of this current trend. The Hungarian-Swiss author Melinda Nadj Abonji with her novel Tauben fliegen auf (2010) and the Slovak-Swiss author Irena Brežná with their most recent novel Die undankbare Fremde (2012) are also part of this trend. The own experiences of escape, foreignness and integration of the two authors, who make an important contribution to intercultural literature in Switzerland, characterize their work in a particularly emphatic manner and thus also repeatedly implicate a discussion of the autobiographical background.

Spory a konflikty medzi slovenskými spisovateľmi v rokoch 1945 – 1948

Author(s): Filip Pavčík / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2018

The study focuses on the Slovak literary life between the years 1945 - 1948, especially on the relations and conflicts among Slovak writers and intellectuals in the short period before the communist coup. In the paper are analysed public reactions to the cleansing of Slovak cultural life in the contemporary cultural journals, whereas the author pays attention mainly on the communist writers. Although these intellectuals were members of the Communist party, many of them had different opinions on how to deal with the problem of cleansing after the second world war. The study wants to emphasize variability of opinions among the communist´s writers and the attention of the study is turned to the interior of the writer´s community, who has been traditionally quarrelled since the first Czechoslovak republic and divided by personal conflicts.

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

Slavic Antiquities and Forgeries as Means for the Shaping of Canons

Author(s): Róbert Kiss Szemán / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

The study deals with the role of Slavic antiquities in the age of national revivals and with the forging of such antiquities. It discusses the subject of Slavic antiquities and forgeries in Central Europe, bringing in the cultural context of Western Europe as well. ‘Antiquity’ is understood to mean a kind of medium that conveyed textual or visual information. The collecting of antiquities became fashionable during the first decades of the 19th century and led to the need for antiquities to be described and categorized. In turn, antiquities served as corpuses for the shaping of modern national cultural canons. It contends that these artefacts, authentic and forged alike, played an important role in moulding the cultural canons of the Slavic nations in Central Europe. An antiquity’s canonical value stemmed from its age most of all and an antiquity needed to be linked as specifically as possible to the history and culture of a given nation. The worth of an antiquity was further boosted when it could be connected with historical personages of great significance. Finally, the more mysterious the history of an antiquity, the greater the degree of speculation permissible in regard to interpretations of it. A forged antiquity is basically an objectification informed by the forger’s thinking and imagination. A forgery bears not just marks characteristic of past times but also marks of the forger and those of the time in which the forgery was made. It is something which calls an entire system into question, thereby causing bewilderment. From this perplexity, only one phenomenon can derive benefit, namely, the national culture. Important among the motives for the forging of Slavic antiquities was the circumstance that framers of canons felt that the structures of their national cultures were incomplete. Researching the reasons for the forging, the study points out structural gaps in the canons in Central Europe as well as traumas stemming from forgeries. Using four examples taken from Kollár’s oeuvre (the Poison Tree of Java, the Slavic idols of Prillwitz, the Queen’s Court and Green Mountain manuscripts and Derzhavin’s poem God in Japanese and Chinese translation) it presents the most common motives behind Slavic forgeries along with the kinds of fake most frequently encountered; it also shows the processes by which forgeries were exposed for what they were. These examples show that when Kollár worked with antiquities and fake antiquities, playing the imposter and pecuniary advantage were very far from him. On the other hand, as a philologist he became a prisoner of contemporary national canonical and emblematic structures.

Словацкая литература в русскоязычном и украиноязычном пространстве: обзор современной ситуации

Author(s): Viktoria Kniazkova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2019

This paper is devoted to the question of Slovak–Russian and Slovak–Ukrainian literary contacts. The tradition of literary translation from Slovak into these two Slavic languages dates back to the moment of codification of the Slovak literary language in the mid-19th century. Since then, it has always been under the pressure of political circumstances. In the initial phase, it was interest to the process of national revival of Slavic peoples in the mid-19th century. The second period of high interest was during the socialist times from the 1960s to the 1980s (this period is mostly prolific for Russian translations from Slovak; on the contrary, the amount of translations into Ukrainian was scanty as Russian language was common for all Soviet nations). There was also a period of total absence of any translation activity from Slovak into Russian during the 1990s. In between these phases, literary translations from Slovak were the fact of personal initiative. The latter is the situation of the present day both in Russia and in Ukraine. That is why when listing the titles translated for the last thirty years, it is crucial to name the most prominent translators and researchers. And this fact is also the cause why the choice of the Slovak works differs greatly, with the same amount of translated titles from Slovak into Russian and Ukrainian. For the last two decades, about twenty Slovak works have been translated into both Russian and Ukrainian, but except for a novel Zóna nadšenia [Enthusiasm Zone] by J. Banaš, there is not a single work of modern Slovak literature translated into both languages. Many significant works of modern Slovak literature are not translated into neither Russian or Ukrainian (for example, there is not a single book edition of the works of P. Vilikovský, P. Pišťanek, D. Kapitáňová, etc.). The most active translators into Ukrainian are researchers and writers living on the territory of Slovak–Ukrainian border T. Likhtei, I. Yatskanin, and some others. In Russia, the most prominent translators from Slovak are Moscow researchers A. Mashkova, A. Peskova, L. Shirokova, and others. The lack of active perception of Slovak literature in foreign language space leads to the inevitable occurrence of a number of translation errors and inaccuracies. This lack also brings about the problem of translation studies and comparative studies, which in Slovakia are based on the translations from Russian into Slovak. The conclusion is made that in spite of the historical, lingual, cultural, and territorial proximity and intense literary contacts in the past, neither Russian, nor Ukrainian space is familiar with the contemporary Slovak literature today. The explanation of this fact may lie in the Slovak self-consciousness, which is much more Central European than Slavic. This observation is made on the basis of the analysis of Slovak literary works as well as previous research mentioned in the paper.

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.

Handbook of Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust Fiction. Works and Contexts. A Short Introduction to the Project with Two Entries

Author(s): Štěpán Balík,Agata Firlej,Elisa-Maria Hiemer,Jiří Holý,Hana Nichtburgerová / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Handbook of Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust Fiction is a work in progress aiming at becoming a standard reference work addressed to universities and public libraries and the broader public. It includes novels, short stories, poems and plays written in Polish, Czech and Slovak within the scope of 650 standard pages. The table of contents consists of 53 articles focused on Polish, 45 articles on Czech, and 23 articles on Slovak literature. The editors provide an introduction about the main developments of Holocaust literature in the broader context of three lands: crucial topics, situations, characters, motifs and places, periodization due to political changes, reception processes in the national and transnational context. The Handbook aims primarily at the researchers and readers in Western Europe and the U.S. where the Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust fiction remains largely unknown. The project results from the cooperation among researchers from Polish, Czech, German and Slovak universities. This article presents two entries from Polish and Czech literature.