The article analyses the poems the Slovak poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (1849 – 1921) wrote in German during his studies at the Evangelical Lyceum in Käsmark/Kežmarok (a town inhabited mostly by Germans at that time) in the late 1860s. The author tackles his poetry in German in the broader cultural and historical context of the region, taking also in account his later work in Slovak. In addition to the thematic-motivic construction of texts Hviezdoslav wrote in German, the paper also deals with their system of imagery and states the dual nature of the poet’s approach to depicting reality. The poems the article scrutinises were inspired by German poets from the late of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. Inspiration is most visible in the sensory concreteness – vividness – of natural sceneries in which space opens up and spreads in all directions in a surprising way. The highly personal tone of the poems and the fact that they address period social affairs lends the texts an even deeper social dimension. Hviezdoslav’s active attitude towards the classical and Christian cultural and spiritual heritage also plays an important role in the poems addressed in this article.
The author of the study analyses selected issues of literary and film language-speech relations both from the point of view of literary and film aesthetics and in the context of the Central European cultural area during the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Especially he is interested in the Czech prose of the 1960s and the “new wave” in Czechoslovak film. The prose and film of the Czech and Slovak filmmakers of the period are remarkably connected with the efforts for a new artistic expression with the pursuit of a new perspective on taboo or ideologically accentuated themes from World War II and the Communist regime. The specific situation of Czechoslovak culture in the 1960s, when the ideological constraints of art were released, enabled the creation of works that are not a closed chapter in literary and film history, but are still inspiring to this day.
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