Slovenska Literatura (Apr 2014)
Druhá spomienková kniha Jána Smreka) .(The Memoirs of an Editor (The Second Memoir Book by Ján Smrek)
Abstract
The study deals with the memoir book by Ján Smrek called Poézie moja láska 2 (Poetry My Love 2, 1989), which is the second part of originally intended multiple volume memoirs. It is also focused on Smrek´s articles published between the years 1930 – 1944 in the magazine Elán, where the poet worked as an editor. Both of the parallel text structures (the study includes articles by other authors published in the contemporary Slovak and Czech print media) feature extending the time period of a certain „historical imagination“, as noted by Paul Ricoeur in the case of various forms of remembering dated events. The memory of the author as the subject finds itself in the centre of the parallel structures, which results in individual chapters of the literary text alternating with comments from the magazine like in a collage. This may be an additional way of restoring the subject´s stances on culture, which are naturally filtered through his own personality. However, the study is primarily based on the reality generated by the chronologically organized memoir prose, which is hypothetically supposed to have tried to capture the history of the particular period of time in writing. The result of it is the interpretation of history reflected on by an individual. What might be useful in this situation is – in my opinion – to examine the issue of an unreliable narrator in autobiographical literature.
