Illusion and Reality by Leopold Abafi

Abstract

The paper analyses a – yet not reflected on – prose by a marginal Romantic writer Leopold Abafi (1827 – 1883) Vidina a skutočnosť /Illusion and Reality/, which was published as a serial in the magazine Sokol (1860). It deals with one of the major topics of Slovak Romantics – love of your homeland and determination to give yourself over to it, while the reduced plot and the emphasized reflexive element in the text make the prose seem like reflexive lyrical Romantic poems about love of one´s nation, which are continually present in Slovak literature throughout the19th century from the 1830s. The text analysis and secondary information sources (correspondence) helped the author of the paper date the text at the second half of the 1840s and put it in the context of the literary works by the poets of the so-called Levoča circle, where – according to Oskár Čepan – the efforts of Slovak Romantic thinking to form the ´Slovak lad´ prototype culminate. She finds and interprets another context of the prose in autobiographic genres published in the second half of the century (Závaté, ale nezapomenuté listí Jozefa Miloslava Hurbana, Hidden but unforgotten leaves of Jozef Miloslav Hurban, Sokol 1862; Rozpomienky na dni peknej mladosti Daniela Maróthyho, Memories of the Days of Daniel Marothy´s Nice Youth, Orol 1873).

Keywords

• romantic prose
• subject
• context of a literary work
• allegory
• autobiography