Slovenska Literatura (Dec 2011)
mages of city and town in Slovak literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (Initial comments on the subject)
Abstract
Town as a literary setting began to be used more often in Slovak literature in the period of Realism, in about the 1870s. Increasing use of town as a motif was writers´ response to the new situation in the society and culture, which occurred as a result of the contemporary modernization, which also included new phonemena of urbanization and the related changes of lifestyle. The literary depiction differentiated between town (mainly Slovak enviroment) and city (most often Budapest, sometimes Prague, very rarely Vienna). Town was presented as ours, Slovak, whereas city as strange – that is unfamiliar (in terms of topography), different (with regard to customs and morals), unknown (as for the language). Although the traditional Slovak opposition concept domestic – strange always contained an element of a priori assessment, where the domestic definitely meant the positive and the strange mostly associated with the negative, the connotations of the town/city were not just black and white. The ´black-and-white spectrum´ was present there but it only functioned as a starting point whose significance was further reviewed or openly questioned within the changes of the genre. That way the original preconceived idea (either positive or negative) gradually developed into its opposite: originally idealized domestic town had to face criticism for its petit bourgeois character and superficiality (Jégé, Jesenský), and on the contrary traditionally disapproved city (namely Budapest) could be experienced as enriching even domesticated enviroment (Daniel Bachát-Dumný, Belo Klein-Tesnoskalský, Samuel Czambel). Although the contemporary literature placed weight on the realistic depiction of the world, its first and foremost intention was not to depict towns and cities realistically but to present ideologically motivated concepts of town and city being either a minority-friendly (acceptable), or dangerous (unacceptable) place.
