This text, meant as a contribution to the subject of Slovak poetry in the 1960s, focuses on two key collections - Zvony (Bells, 1968) by M. Rufus and Milovanie v husej kozi (Making love with goose pimples, 1965) by M. Valek. It tracks down their motifs such as corporeality, heart, bells in relation to emphatic-historical restoration of man's broken relationship with the others, himself, the world - lyricism then functions as either melancholic (M. Rufus), or farcically sarcastic (M. Valek) incomplete or disillusioned evidence of 'the world condition'. Vitally experienced corporeality changes to remains and traces of a human - in the style of a symbolic relic (M. Rufus), a degraded prop (M. Valek). In order to make contrast within synecdochic interpretations, J. Ondrus's and I. Laucik's texts are also given consideration. The interpretation procedure does not conceal. It is always a paraphrase, synecdoche, ellipsis and amplification of the discussed poem, too. However, what is centrally projected is the world evoked by the text. The present text can be perceived as a partial contribution to the 'thematological poetics' (a term coined by P. Zajac), interconnecting the motifs, tropology and a decently viewed historical context.
The present article deals with P. Vilikovsky's prose Eskalacia citu I (Emotion Escalation I, written in the mid 1970s, published in a magazine in 1982, in the collection of short stories Eskalacia citu in 1989) - in a latent discussion with P. Zajac's interpretations and comments accompanying the edition P. Vilikovsky: Prozy (2005). The study advances in four steps. 1. It makes the inter-textual bonds with J. M. Hurban's romantic historical prose Olejkar (Medicine man) more precise, raises a question of the book's motifs, synonymic fictional prose in forming a story plot and its disillusioned reassessment, touches two potential inter-textual traces more (I. Bunin, V. Holan). 2. It pays attention to the text's lyric dimension (the handicapped heroine's lyric sensibility, the exploiting of idiomatic expressions and key words, analogically with contemporary poetry) and its parallel rhetoric dimension (negotiations of the characters when facing misunderstandings), named ad hoc as 'enthymeme'. 3. It outlines 'Piestany topos' of Slovak literature in the early 1970s (D. Tatarka, P. Vilikovsky) and 'spa semantics' in the plot of Eskalacia citu I. 4. It returns to the prose Olejkar and in discussion correlates its final scene of the trial with the culprits with the subject of 'love', excess, violence, rape in Eskalacia citu I, with the characters' interpretations and assessment. - Notes on P. Vilikovsky's prose end in a statement that it is disturbingly 'open' in reading and interpreting of text.
This reflection is a short summary of reading and partly of a work experience with the texts devoted to Slovak literature. They come approximately from the half of the last century. This experience points the title of formulated thesis. Writing about poetry was particularly focused on older personalized line (empathic or critically distant), and stressing more evocation of the work, dealing with the character of an author and methodically progressing a structural line. Inspirational confrontation with transformation in poetry that happened in the end of the 50s and the 60s evolved several interpretational initiatives concentrated on semantically complicated contemporary poetic texts. Fiction, modernized in all transformations, would more correspond with all articulated constituted 'worlds' than contemporary poetry with intermediate self-understanding of society, with its official or alternative explanation and with the 'world' opening explosiveness, contemplativeness, fragmentariness, etc. Analogies of narrative fiction and historiography interpretation could help in a less conflicted transposed fiction in treating history of literature. An experience that makes rather problematic usual work with literature of a strong poetry sort can serve as a reminder: history is not only stated by 'subsequence' and 'similarity' of facts (in all methodological travesties still always by Comte's provenience), but it has non spectacular dimension 'in actu' evolving semantic ruptures, explosions, epiphanies, illuminations, or catastrophes.
The subject of the paper is Šialený mesiac /The Mad Moon/ by J. Ondruš as a key poetic text of Slovak lyric written in the 1960s – placing the accent on the aspects of his poetics and the ways of identifying them. The paper evolves in several steps. 1. It takes notice of the updates of surreal inspirations namely in the 1960s. 2. It confronts the versions of the poem published in a magazine and in his book debut. It takes notice of certain corrections of eccentricity of the subject-character. 3. It presents an attempt at mythological and philosophical, and intertextual placing of the lunar and lunatic motifs with regard to The Mad Moon. 4. It shows (in reference to P. Ricoeur) the progression of „stain“, „mistake“ and „guilt“ as the indices of fatal human deficiency. 5. The actual critical reading of the poem follows the oscillation between the factual physical everyday dimension of the course of events, and the emphatic, „lunatically“ excessive one,: the „mad moon“ as a cipher of human and poetic existence, as a cipher of poetry itself, its magic power and deficiency.
By comparing two versions of Ján Ondruš´s poem A Hat of Wine and critically reading the version in his debut book, the paper arrives at the characteristic of the selected piece of writing, which is an intersection of different types of poetics relevant for interpretation of Slovak poetry written in the 1960s in general: sadness, or Baudelairesque „spleen“ and its projection into physical base being lived, a rural genre featuring characteristic details, expressivization and metaphorization of physical gestures, excessiveness of the mental state of the poetic „self“ also suggested through the magic of lunatism, employing surrealist imagery, the author´s individual poetics of fatal returnability and repetitiveness, text enigmatization as a result of abridging the text, the archetypal lyric „nox et solitudo“ situation. At the end of the paper the question that arises is what results from these findings and what it means for the impression of Ján Ondruš´s poetic writing in terms of semantics and values.
The paper features the writer´s memory of his first meeting with Peter Zajac as a reader and interpreter of poetry in the late 1970s and of his work on Štefan Strážay´s poetry being both initiation and inspiration. Then the paper advances in several steps: it records Zajac´s initial generational vitality of developing theories, his inclination towards existentialism in the last quarter-century; this represents the framework of „shivering aesthetics“ being currently developed by P. Zajac – also in relation to the 20th century modern poetry; what proves to be fundamental for him is the phenomenon and notion of the „noble“. It can be exemplified by the writer´s brief excursion into the „country“ in Ivan Laučík´s poetry. The actual „shivering“ of the lyric text in its making and reading is demonstrated by the last sketch of Ján Ondruš´s poem Radosť (Joy, the introductory idyll, natural-musical melancholy, the interior of solitude, the final melancholy freeze and a possible lyric catharsis, their discreet oscillations).
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