Taking the work of Vladimír Hurban Vladimírov (pseudonym VHV, 1884 – 1950) as its prism, the article aims at providing an insight into the state of the language and the issue of language politics in ...the interwar period in the Slovak linguistic enclave in Vojvodina, Serbia. The article analyses the linguistic work of VHV and addresses the topic of language planning. VHV, in his attempts at strengthening the knowledge of their mother tongue among Slovaks in Serbia, took an active part in the forming of the modern Slovak language. He published linguistic essays in local periodicals and developed language courses for the locals. He taught Slovak in two basic courses – in 1925 and 1943 – in Stara Pazova. The students of his second course used Slovačka slovnica (1942) – a grammar book written by the Croatian Slovakophile Josip Andrić (1894 – 1964). The level of the knowledge of the language among the locals and the lack of specialised and normative publications prompted VHV to explain phenomena pertaining to Slovak orthography, morphology, lexicology, etymology and dialectology. He advocated for an etymological orthography and was of the opinion that orthography should only reflect the standard and codified variation of the language.
The article offers an interpretation of Malé veľké mesto (Little big city 2008), the third book of poetry/long poem by the contemporary Slovak poet and writer Katarína Kucbelová (1979), the author of ...four books of poetry and a novella. From the point of view of poetics, Malé veľké mesto is a transitional text, a breaking point in the development of the author’s style. The book embodies a change towards a more concrete way of expression and contains topics, motives and language typical of Kucbelová’s later works. The article tackles two mutually intertwined aspects of the poem – the city and the subject. The central principle of the poem is the projection of the subject into the time and space. The city (specified as Bratislava) can be analysed from the point of view of urban studies as outlined by Olivier Mongin – through his theses on the urban situation and various forms of flows in the city and the creation of bonds with it. The issue of identity that is intimately connected with the city is read on the background of various forms the speaking subject in Katarína Kucbelová’s poetry takes. In her early work, the subject focuses on biological and physical traits, later she moves onto the analysis of her individualised experience complex and, finally, in her fourth book of poetry Vie, čo urobí (He knows what he will do 2012), the subject turns her attention to the society. A discussion of Malé veľké mesto illustrates the gradual abandonment of the fragmented (non)subject bearing traces of postmodernist subjectivity and a move towards a more decisive delineation of the boundaries of an individual.
The article deals with controversies concerning the authorial self-presentation of the Slovak writer Peter Pišťanek (1960 – 2015) and changes his attitude towards the role of the writer underwent. In ...the 1990s, when Pišťanek was a publishing author and his work was widely discussed, he ostentatiously rejected the status of the writer. However, later, after he stopped being active as an author, he partially assumed it. Until then, he would repeatedly present himself as a non-elite word craftsman (worker). This radical public gesture brought him a unique position in the Slovak literary field in the early 1990s. He would degrade the status of the writer both in his public self-presentations and in the key works of his first creative period. In these, the characters of writers are portrayed with a radical irony. Paradoxically, at the break of the 21st century, after he publically declared that he no longer writes fiction, Pišťanek embraces the role of the celebrity author. This shift can be observed in his editorial activities, in interviews and journalism he authored at that time. Empathetic understanding of the character of the writer replaced the former ironic detachment.
The article focuses on poetological and axiological analysis of the Slovak collection of poems Liza Gennart: Výsledky vzniku (Outcomes of origin, 2020). The collection is part of the project created ...by the poet and theorist of electronic literature, Zuzana Husárová (b. 1983) and the sound artist and programmer Ľubomír Panák (b. 1979) who trained a neural network to generate its poems. Texts generated by neural networks are usually referred to as synthetic. In the article, we therefore propose to use the term synthetic poetry to denote poetry generated by neural networks. Introductory parts of the article address the global contexts in which such a work of literature is nested (changes in the economy, position of literature in the current world, problems faced by the humanities today) and technological issues pertaining to natural language processing. What follows is a literary-historical contextualisation in which we outline the history of generative writing in Slovak literature, the issue of authorial teams co-creating poetry, and virtual authorial signatures. In concluding section, the article provides a textual analysis and proposes to conceptualise this instance of synthetic poetry in terms of (1) poetics of defect, (2) poetics of incoherence, and (3) poetics of reduction.
In the early 1930s, a group of young Catholic poets entered the Slovak literary scene with a new approach to the creation of poetry derived from mysticism. Poets Pavol Gašparovič Hlbina (1908 – ...1977), Rudolf Dilong (1905 – 1986), and Ján Haranta (1909 – 1983) found encouragement in the works La Poésie pure (Pure poetry, 1926) and Prière et Poésie (Prayer and Poetry, 1926) by Henri Bremond who proposed aesthetic instructions that should lead to absolute poetry. The paradoxes of mysticism and poetry, however, proved to be unachievable in poetic practice, even less so when blended with new avant-garde movements of poeticism and surrealism. The most notable approach to absolute poetry in the first half of the 20th century can be found in the work of Janko Silan (1914 – 1984), whose epic-dramatic poetry, self-referential character of verse, and natural-human pantheistic and panentheistic view of the world eventually surpassed poetic spontaneity, wordplay, and Freudian psychoanalytic method. The most radical attempt at absolute poetry came after 1989 with the work of Erik Jakub Groch (b. 1957), who, through depoeticisation, reaches the threshold between literature and mysticism, pursuing goals in both the literary and extra-literary space. An important aim of Groch's absolute poetry is an attempt to execute transfer from literary to actual epiphanies.
Hana Gregorová’s (1885 – 1958) early work was mostly concerned with themes pertaining to women’s emancipation. Later, the author widened her scope and also dealt with the questions of social justice. ...Feminist instrumentalisation as outlined in her debut collection of short prose Ženy (Women 1912) was combined with projecting a new, better world for all the impoverished ones. Social and pedagogical (didactic) function remained a stable characteristic of her writing. As to her themes, Gregorová was mainly concerned with the depiction of the suffering women and her empathising authorial narrator was a representative figure voicing progressive ideas. Works that the author published before 1918 (but also those from the first half of the 1920s) were later significantly revised. Gregorová updated her early work in accordance with the way her opinions evolved (especially with regards to her affinity towards socialist and communist ideas) and also as a reaction to the changes in social circumstances (the end of Second World War). Analysis of the revisions the author made in the second publication of the collection Ženy (1946) had a direct impact on the poetics of the texts and in turn also influenced the literary-historical reception of the collection – a fact that is most visible in cases in which the scholars only worked with the second edition
The article provides interpretation of the changes the prototext of Ivan Laučík’s (1944 – 2004) poems “Biely film” (White film from the collection Havránok, 1998) and “Tam, kde nie som” (There, Where ...I’m Not from the collection Na prahu počuteľnosti At the threshold of hearing, 1988) underwent since it was included in the letter to Peter Repka from 10 September 1970. The contribution concentrates on three main issues. The first one concerns the intertextual reference the prototext makes to the poem by the French journalist and author Jean-Paul de Dadelsen (1913 – 1957) “Jonas” and the possible meanings it brings to the prototext. The absence of this reference in the poem “White film” serves the convergent function. The article then provides a comparative interpretation of the changes between the prototext and the poem “White film”. These appear to have made the poem clearer and strengthened its metaphysical aspect through intensifying the presence of “illumination/light” motives and elements in the poem. Finally, the contribution analyses the modifications the last four lines of the prototext underwent before they were included in the poem “There, Where I’m Not”. The article argues that the poet attempted at simplifying the segment as to the poetic devices it employs and at making it clearer. In result, the singular lived experience was transformed into a general maxim.
The article analyzes German-written poetic texts that the Slovak poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (1849-1921) created during his studies at the Evangelical Lyceum in the second half of the 1960s in the ...town of Käsmark/Kežmarok, which was then inhabited mainly by Germans. Pavol Országh's poetry in German is understood in the broader cultural and historical context of the region and with the knowledge of the poet's later work in Slovak. In addition to the thematic-motivic construction of German-written texts, the paper also deals with their system of imagery and states the dual nature of the poet's approach to depicting reality.
The article is a contribution towards interpretations of Ján Botto’s (1829 – 1881) ballad Žltá ľalia (Yellow lily 1849, published in a magazine in 1860). It tackles the resonances between the Slovak ...Romantic poet’s poem with Lenore (1774), a ballad written by the German Pre-Romantic poet Gottfried August Bürger (1747 – 1794). It draws on comparatist works of the Slovak literary historian Zlatko Klátik and the Polish researcher Marie Janion, but also on literary-historical research that takes into account the specifics of Slavic versions of the motive of Lenore. The article dwells mainly on the female persona, primarily on the model set by Bürger, but also on other intertextual variants in Slavic poetry. Based on Botto’s ballad, the author identifies the Slovak variant of the motive of Lenore. This variation derives from folk literature, but simultaneously draws on some of the basic features of the Romantic imagination – the intertwining of the world of the living with the world of the dead and the presence of mysterious elements in everyday worldly life experience. Intertextual relations between the Slovak poem and Bürger’s Lenore, textual development of the female persona in the two texts and the position which female personas attain in Romanticism by way of accentuating feminine otherness are the central themes tackled in the article.
The article concentrates on interpreting Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav’s (1849 – 1921) ballads – the part of his oeuvre which has only been investigated marginally so far. His ballads from the late 19th ...and early 20th centuries (U kaplice At the chapel, Zuzanka Hraškovie Zuzanka Hraškovie, Anča Anča, Margita Margita, Studnica The well, Smelá Katka Daring Katka, Topeľci Drowned, Jedlica Fir tree, Krivoprísažník False witness, Mladá vdova Young widow, Matúš Stolár Matúš Carpenter) adapt some of the traditional themes of folk and Romantic ballads (crime and punishment, moral failure, folk customs), but also bring new motives (search for the spiritual path from pragmatic truth criteria, property disputes and unorthodox solutions to life problems, social and economic disparity and its effects). Comparison of Hviezdoslav’s ballads with those written by Slovak poets of the Romantic period Janko Kráľ and Ján Botto shows his authentic realist attitude in the handling of the genre. Hviezdoslav accentuated the epical side of the narratives, employing several means of representation (on the level of the narrator and on the level of the structure of the stanza and verse). He realised the lyrical side of the narratives, their balladic atmosphere – also through the functional structure of the verse – but primarily through expressive, lyrical depictions and commentaries.
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