BETWEEN IDEOLOGY AND ADVENTURE (RUDOLF JASIK: 'MRTVI NESPIEVAJU' /DEAD DO NOT SING/ )

• Authors: Pruskova Z.
• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

The text is a scholarly commentary of the war novel 'Dead Do Not Sing' written by Rudolf Jasik in 1961. The study is a part of a wide conceived collective grant :'The 20th Century Key Slovak Literary Works' focused on the explanation of a literary work within a specific context of the national literature. The aim of the study is to characterise qualities of the Jasik's work, a key work in the context of close and farther literary environment, from the aspect of the history of literature, typology as well as its narrowly defined poetical features. The bases of the study is classification of the novel according to historically generic circumstances, typical for a part of Slovak prosaic texts depicting WW II and the national resistance, written per order, but in fact exceeding literary quality or at least relativising ideological demands to write under the plain-colour optic. This kind of literature includes works by D. Tatarka, A. Bednár or L. Lahola. They are symptomatically influenced by dramatic, tragic even absurd war experience (Tatarka's 'The Cock in Agony', Lahola's 'The Last Thing'). Some of the war testimonies or the war resistance experiences are patterned through parallel literary techniques and strategies (interpolation of the balladry structure into composition and narration of Bednár's 'The Glass Mout'). Jasik's novel connects techniques of autobiography and expressive existential involvement of the narrator with unusual topos of subject-composition intervention of the adventurous genre in ideologically stressed narration about relative character of heroism or a heroic act. Jasik's strong point is a hero modelled at the edge of a type and character. In his novel 'Dead Do not Sing' it is presented by a young guardian, later partisan J. Klako. From the literary aspect he does not fit with the scheme of an ideal character, but he is introduced as an adventurous easygoing figure. Only after a traumatized experience having faced unconditional choice in an extreme situation (life or death) he becomes a hero co-organizing dangerous liberating operation in an occupied city. In the novel 'Dead Do not Sing' Jasik introduces non-schematic picture of good and evil, brave and faint-hearted people. The war itself - apocalyptic, beyond all understanding is a real 'hero' of his unfinished trilogy - a man- exceeding modality unable to bring any conditions for ideological decoration and an idle opinion, typical for schematic literature. Beside Lahola's short prose Jasik's novel, as one of the few war theme texts in Slovak literature after 1945, fulfils European and worldly established concept of front line and war literature qualitatively comparable with the war texts of the Lost Generation authors.

Keywords

EN

FRONT LINE LITERATURE; IDEOLOGY; SCHEMATIC LITERATURE; WAR NOVEL

Discipline

• ARTS_&_ARCHITECTURE: ARTS & ARCHITECTURE

• Publisher: Institute of Slovak Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovenská literatúra (Slovak Literature)
• Year: 2006
• Volume: 53
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 1-10
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Pruskova Z.

• Z. Pruskova, Ustav slovenskej literatury SAV, Konventna 13, 813 64 Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

06SKAAAA01172693