Slovenska Literatura (Oct 2001)
Ivan Minárik
Abstract
The prose of Ivan Minárik from the turn of the 20-tieth and 30-tieth of the 20lh century closes, brings to an end and revalues literary gestures of the modernistic wave of after coup decade. In spite of many affinities to the works of Gašpar, Hrušovský and Horvath, the prose of Minárik follows mainly European literary tradition and European literature of the period fin de siecle. Philosophical inspirations from Bergsonism and Nietcheism are dominant, as well as continuance in the literature of Decadence and Secession. Minárik is focused on the cult of sexual hedonism, absolutisation of a while and intensification of sensual pleasures. The proses of Minárik represent characters identical to ’’erotic players” in their qualities. They live apart from the sphere of social reality, ethics and conventional ’’rules” of bourgeois society. Their identity is dissolved in chaos of erotic excitements, hallucinations arid hypnotic delirious states. They follow naturalisme spiritualisme of Huysmans and we can record them as the documents of ”a naked soul”. The message tends from the glorification of body and of physical delight through metaphor of nerving and cerebral system (’’cérebralité”) to ’’the mysticism of unconsciousness” and to theoretically - practical experiences of parapsychology and occultism. The cult of pleasure and boundless beguile by sexuality and unrestrained sensuality is developed in the paradigm of neopaganism (Nietzsche), new Satanism (Huysmans) or a new hedonism (Wilde). ’’The aesthetic of collapse” (Marquard) manifests in the life of Minárik's epic character in permanent oscillation between the states of an exerted sensualism and states of a dull depression, in the captivity of the vicious circle of passion and boredom.
