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EN
The paper is based on the current conception of reception of the debut novel written by Dušan Kraus (1937 – 2001) Životy unikajúce/Lives Fleeing (1979). There is genealogical and typological perspective and a literary historical perspective adopted in it, the paper offers an outline reconstruction of the literary career of a lesser-known writer. The subject of the analysis is the basic semantic layers of the work (language, narration, composition) and its genealogical and typological foundations. Within the context of prose written at that time, the novel is a specific piece of writing placed outside the established development lines. It is incompatible with what was introduced by the „novel situation“ at the turn of the 1980s, it is a work of production prose, while it is not influenced by ideological requirements, it is a contemporary piece of prose which was published at the time when Slovak literature was being dominated by past-bound works. Životy unikajúce/Lives Fleeing as a production or, alternatively, „work“ novel is an unusual variant of the subgenre in Slovak literature. In terms of evolution, it is situated somewhere halfway from the ideologically biased depiction of the work environment in the 1950s towards subversive recoding of the subject matter in the second half of the 1980s (in the works of the writers such as Peter Pišťanek and Dušan Taragel).
EN
The article takes a look at the representations of Bratislava in Dušan Kraus’s debut novel Životy unikajúce [Lives Leaking; 1979]. It reconstructs the methods that model the city and its image in the context of other portrayals of the urban setting in Slovak prose (Ladislav Ballek: Pomocník [The helper]; Agáty [The locust trees]; Stanislav Rakús: Temporálne poznámky [Temporal notes]). The novel does not name the city in which it takes place, but from the names of locations and the typical spatial arrangements it pertains that the text is set in Bratislava. The differentiation of the spatial structure is complementary with the division of space into the private and public spheres. Social life functions (work and amusement) are situated in the centre while private lives unwind in the new housing estates at the outskirts of the city. Kraus portrayed Bratislava of the normalisation era in line with its period character, i.e. as urbs, but not as civitas (Olivier Mongin: The Urban Condition) – as a city without a public space. The novel works with two semantic layers. The narrative is of factual or even official record character, the symbolic generalisation rests on the double meaning of the title that evokes both a gas leak and the movement of its victims from life to death as well as the city as a fluid, unstable entity where life “leaks” from its inhabitants.
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