EN
In terms of genre theory, this study is a follow-up to Pavol Winczer's concept of the poetic litanies introduced in his study The litany form and Halas's Old women (1935). The research into litany-like poems written by Slovak surrealists (R. Fabry, V. Reisel, S. Zary, P. Buncak, J. Rak) and Jozef K. Smalov's theoretical comments on religious litanies (The litanies of Loretania, 1974, 1998 as a book) form the basis of Juhasova's litany pattern theory, in which she corrects and completes previous concepts. The interpretation of the poems supports her theory, according to which there are two types of the litany form: processional and meditative. The features of the former one are large text size, enumeration and free composition. The latter one, noticeable in P. Buncak's and R. Fabry's poems, is characterised by the inter-relationship between poetic lines and a more complex text structure. The study also examines the specific features of the surrealist litany variant with regard to the composition (liberating compositional patterns, departure from the two-part verse), subject matter (erotic and death motifs), meaning nuances (absence, ambivalence), preferred techniques (body dismemberment, sensory organs' defects and their significance in composition, antithetic statements, irony), while the research into the poems' imagery and structure also reveals the stylistic diversity of individual surrealists' poetics.