Slovenska Literatura (Nov 2019)
Markovič´s Biblical Image of a Woman. Slovak-language Low-land Literature through Rudo Brtáň´s Eyes
Abstract
The paper is dedicated to the literary historical legacy of the slavist Rudo Brtáň (1907 – 1998). It is inspired by Brtáň´s research on Slovak-language Low-land literature, in particular the chapter Literature and Culture of Slovak Protestants in Sarvaš (1722 – 1918), which comes from the yet unpublished manuscript titled Slovak-language Low-land Literature until 1918. The paper focuses on the work of Michal Markovič Sr. (1707 – 1762/4), who worked in Sarvaš (present-day Hungary) as a Slovak evangelical priest. The analysis deals with Markovič´s collection of poems called Duchovní zrcadlo ženského pohlaví z Písem svatých představené/The Spiritual Mirror of the Female Sex presented in the Holy Scriptures, printed probably in Bratislava in 1783. The method of the text analysis is supported by the theoretical assumptions of the Czech literary historian Eduard Petrů, who saw the basis for the interpretation of a literary work in revealing the interpretation core. The goal is to identify the author´s intention encoded in the genesis of Markovič´s collection, and to decode the reader´s interpretation of that time. Markovič wrote the collection in order to stimulate moral attitudes of the whole evangelical community, not only the women´s. He composed it with the intention to support the Bible self-study motivating the readers with the inserted biblical coordinates as well as narratives reduced to several poetic lines. The contribution of the analysis can be seen in classifying the genre of the collection as a collection of epigram-like poems. These findings confirm the influence of ancient and renaissance literature on Slovak literary production written in the local vernacular in the mid-18th century.
