Slovenska Literatura (Jul 2016)
The Double Identity of War Experience. The Distance between the Author and the Self in Slovak Post-War Literature (Leopold Lahola and Jožko Lánik)
Abstract
The goal of the paper is to explain the rupture in the line of Slovak war prose between the year 1945 and February 1948, when Socialist Realism was pronounced the only method of artistic production. The prospects of ´brighter tomorrows´ cast black light back on the existential/existentialist line. The methodical assumption is the comparative analysis of several writers´ production, while Leopold Lahola is seen as the key one. His prose is interpreted here in the context of the work of contemporary Jewish writers as well as non-Jewish authors such as the Italian Cesare Pavese. At the same time the study theoretically specifies the changes of accents of configurations of the author and the self within the pluralistic poetics of the 1940s. It is supported by several layers of Slovak reception of philosophical Existenialism. The period of liberalisation of the 1960s revived the interest in this movement. The key concept of ´situation´ was still (or again) seen at the end of the decade as artificial, too theoretical (Viliam Marčok). Also, existential referentiality was considered to be ideologically shaky. This card had to be reckoned with and it was by Jozef Felix who, when trying to legitimize the work of “foreign” Lahola, claimed it was due to the anxiety resulting from the cruel war experience and he distanced it (more Lahola himself) from Existentialism. The choice of double identity of assumptions made it possible. In order to verify the reliability of this statement, the author of the paper compared Lahola´s work with both the parallel line of documentary prose (Alfréd Wetzler) and Cesare Pavese´s existential diary records of his life. One of them became the motto of Lahola´s collection of short stories Posledná vec/The Last Thing. Several poetological and ideological parallels between Lahola and Pavese´s work have been identified.
