Ebook: One Hundred Years of Slovak Literature: An Anthology

The anthology, One Hundred Years of Slovak Literature, which you have before you and which is published in two language versions - Slovenian and English - came about in response to a request from outside. It is the most natural reaction to the decision by the international jury and the leadership of the festival devoting one day of the literary event, Vilenica 2000, in Slovenia to Slovak literature and its presentation in this Central European but also European “point of contact”, mixing and mutually communicating different literatures and cultures. The additional symbolism of the year 2000 gave an impulse to create the project which - within the limits of its scope - for both the curious and professional reader recapitulates the last one hundred years of modern Slovak literature. It is not only an interval in time, but a socially important period during which Slovak literature established for itself those aesthetic functions without which it would not be possible to emerge from the space of its own immanence, in particular a nationally-representative content to the communication of new meanings and expressive forms relevant in international contexts, of course, especially in the modern literary and art scene and later the post-modern.
...Our aim was to introduce the foreign reader mainly to poetry and prose from Slovakia. Limitations in space prevented the appearance of extracts from drama, essays and also work for children by Slovak writers in this period and the work Slovak writers living in other countries or members of linguistic and ethnic minorities in Slovakia.
...The English version of the anthology is accompanied by a bibliographical list of book titles which have been translated from Slovak to English although this not absolutely complete.
...Even more typical of modern Slovak literature itself are the moment of discontinuity, contingency, fragmentation, chasms, breaks and incompletion. The function of literature undergoes a dramatic change. The Romantic period is distinguished by the culturally representative function of literary texts. The period of Realism is dominated by a literary text as an expression of the “spirit of times.” In the period of Modernism at the turn of the century a literary text becomes a battlefield of the fight for the individual identity of subject. In literature between the wars the upper hand is gained by the immanent function of a literary text. Literature after the Second World War is characterized by the struggle between Modernism with its growing emphasis on self-reference,i.e. the text itself in its vanguard radicalism or post-modern intertextuality and Socialist Realism in the employ of class ideology.