A War Veteran as a Visionary: On the Poetics and Metaphysics in Ján Hrušovský´s Work

Abstract

The images of the world created in the consciousness of the „revolution“ generation (of the years 1830 and 1848) and the„war“ generation (of the years 1914 -1918) had a few elements in common. The goal of the article is to show how the legacy of „Black“ Romanticism of the 1920s made it possible to communicate the trauma caused by World War I. The first part of the article therefore presents World War I from the perspective of social history while I use a monograph by the American historian Eric J. Leed. Then I suggest that certain frequent literary motifs might be related to the way World War I was waged. The second part of the article interpretes the war proses written by the Slovak writer Ján Hrušovský (1892-1975) in the 1920s and offers four „images“ which are his „insight“ into the physical world as well as metaphysical reality.

Keywords

• expressionism
• black romanticism
• world war i
• ján hrušovský