The literary remains of Karol Plicka (1894 - 1987) have been lodged since the second half of the 1980s in the Slovak National Museum in Martin. The paper is devoted to the history and the current state of the remains, describes the manner of their processing and identifies their content. It is centrally concerned with providing a picture of the manuscript notebook records of Slovak folk songs, which form the core of Plicka's literary remains.
The manuscript collection of Karol Plicka (1894–1987) is one of the most important sources for the Slovak folk song dating from the first half of the 20th century. A prerequisite for the study of this collection is a thoroughgoing source criticism of the song repertoire recorded, which also serves as the starting point for further processing and evaluation. Based on the song material recorded in the Trenčín region (in western Slovakia), we address the issues of classification of the song repertoire in terms of the occasions for singing, the functions of song, and the bearers of song tradition. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the system of song genres which was present in the background to Plicka’s concept of collection, as one of the important aspects of the documentation of traditional singing. Part of this reconstruction is an attempt to distinguish the specific features of Plicka’s work in relation to the particular song categories.
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