he study is a part of a collective project focused on interpretation of the key Slovak literary works of the 20th c. The aim of it is to read known and in the case of a novel of František Hečko ...Červené víno (The Red Wine) also classicised works in confrontation with the previously made interpretations. The starting point for the interpretation is textological, a comparison of several editions of Červené víno (The red Wine), while the decisive conceptive differences are mostly between the first and all other following editions. The next step of our work was a typological identification of the work. We used a typology coming from M. M. Bachtin. The significant changes of the text of the first edition made by the author himself (1948), which are followed in the all the editions up to now, can be explained predominantly by outside circumstances, that means establishment of the Communist regime in 1948 and a radically new cultural politics, which negated hard plural model of literature having been respected until that time. Hečko adapted to this situation. He responded as an embattled socialistic writer and that was why he reduced in the novel much of what belongs to main natural resources of Červené víno (The Red Wine): motives, in which folk Catholicism had appeared, biblical lexical layer, as well as oral and ethic bases characteristic for the Christian cultural model. He changed markedly the end of the novel and he put into a class aspect –required by the period and regime. His changes were in contradiction of the former structure of the novel, which was based on the principles of how Bachtin identifies idyllic chronotop. The interpretation is an attempt to reveal of former conceptual bases of Hečko´s writing and to point out the non – organic changes in his novel which were required by the historical situation.
Using the theme of sectarianism, the paper compares the works written by Russian representative of Symbolism Andrei Bely (1880 – 1934) and Slovak Realist writer Svetozár Hurban Vajanský (1847 – 1916) ...– namely the novels The Silver Dove (1909) and The Root and The Shoots (1895-6). Russian literary science has been dealing with sectarianism in Bely´s work in the last few years but the sectarian motifs in Vajanský´s works have not been particularly examined. Interliterary comparison brings the corpus of Slovak literary works written in the late 19th century into the European context. The authors from the opposite extremes of the turn of the two centuries are related by the origin of their thinking – the ideas of Russian slavophiles. What is important are the efforts made to revive the novel as a genre in a modern manner: A. Bely achieved a worldwide succes and S. H. Vajanský did as well in Slovak literature, where he forged the „novel situation“. Both of the works compared are critical of the social system, the dysfunctional elites of the society and challenge the official church. Sectarianism in Bely´s and Vajanský´s works is seen here in the wider context of the „dark“ world reflected on in literary Modernism. Bely used this phenomenon to build up his novel from within as a part of his artistic and philosophical pursuit in the context of Russian Modern. Sectarianism in the work by Vajanský, who used it as one of the motifs, was the result of finding new themes and phenomena which would make it possible to define the nature of the contemporary life of Slovak society.
