Slovenska Literatura (Jun 2003)
The Interliterary Aspect of the History of Slovak Medieval and Renaissance Literature
Abstract
The subject of the article is a coherence of Slovak literature, factors of development in Dalmatic, Southern-Western and Mediterranean interliterary community and at least some of the aspects of interliterary communities. The basis of it comes from Slovak medieval and renaissance literature: “Proglas” by Constantine Philosopher; Slovak and after Great Moravian troubadours; a poem Vítaj milý Spasiteľu (Welcome dear Saviour); so called Spiš sermons; Marian songs and lauds and historical song Píseň o sigetském zámku (The Song about Sigetský Castle). Those literary facts join in the article parallel phenomena in Dalmatic literature, in Glagolitic, in international Dalmatic troubadours, in Croatian – Dalmatic adoration of Virgin Mary. The cultural consciousness in Dalmatia was strongly influenced by genres of both Italian Renaissance and anti-Turkish poetry. The Slovak literature probably did not develop towards nationally-literary self-consciousness only by influence of general conditions of two periods and it was not just their result. It was predominantly their initial identity, that means medieval, baroque, which was connected with Italian and Croatian and Dalmatic effort and imported Western situation concerning genres in Middle Ages and in Renaissance into national and Slovak language and culture. Because Latin and Italian works were translated into Slavonic language in Dalmatia and so other Slavonic literatures had possibility to make them known better, to come into the interliterary community based on linguistically-emotional participation of a person who communicates in an act of interpretation and communication. The article shows different images if life of interliterary communities. It proves that the uniqueness of the communities are inliterary and outliterary homogen conditions because they support creative imitation So it depends on them how the literary processes will be integrated, differ, made whole. The equivalences are phenomenal image of the collective memory which is a basis of collective tradition (convention, agreement) on the level of a national literature or an interliterary community. Interliterary life of the tradition makes an interliterary space. It is a space of regular development. It is a structure in the way of Czech-Slovak literary structuralistic tradition because it bears a memory of literary shapes and ways of literary transformation. This transformational memory is announced in a certain historically concrete literary environment. Communication has to be an object of literary historiography in a real existing transformational environment (including discovery of that environment). Only by this way the literary historicism will not be a narrow view.
