ČLOVEK, ZVIERA, BOH, STROJ. SUBVERZIA TELA A TELESNOSTI VO VÁLKOVOM MILOVANÍ V HUSEJ KOŽI

• Authors: Gavura Ján

Title variants

EN

Human, animal, God, machine. On the subversion of body and corporeality in Miroslav Válek’s Milovanie v husej koži (Love making in a goose skin)

• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

Miroslav Válek’s collection Milovanie v husej koži ([Love making in a goose skin] 1965) represents an example of an extreme confrontation of man with the pressing questions of his own mortality in the context of Slovak poetry. The author derives his doubts about the meaning of the world and of man from strictly material and rational observations, from which he excludes the presence and action of a transcendent force or being (God), and instead presents the world as a confluence of coincidences, a mechanical action at the level of physical objects and bodies, whose movement is machine-like and whose life, often reduced to the level of animals, remains enclosed in an impoverishing animal finality. The publication of the book was followed by a literary polemic which largely influenced the perception and evaluation of Válek’s human attitude and the applied philosophical concepts. However, the thematisation of the negation of the immanent transcendent principle and its replacement by a fatalistic materialistic structure of the world does not in itself degrade the artistic achievement, and in retrospect, Válek’s radical and absolute gesture expressed in the book can be understood as part of his autonomous lyric journey.

Keywords

EN

SLOVAK POETRY; MIROSLAV VÁLEK; SUBVERSION; BODY; CORPOREALITY

• Publisher: Institute of Slovak Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovenská literatúra (Slovak Literature)
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 71
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 291 – 310

Contributors

author

Gavura Ján

• Filozofická fakulta Prešovskej university, Ulica 17. novembra 1, 080 01 Prešov, Slovak Republic

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6662-9931

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/slovlit.2024.71.3.7