This paper is an attempt to reconstruct Walter Benjamin's notions of a collector, collecting and a collection. The reflection on collectors and their activity proves to be crucial to 'the material philosophy of the nineteenth century' that the author was trying to write. Benjamin's insight into collecting is based, among other factors, on his own experience, and there are parallels between the way he conducts his studies, the way his works are structured and compiled, and the collector's activity and the collection respectively. This study of Benjamin's understanding of collecting puts special emphasis on the relationship between the collection and the collector's individual memory, on the role of an interpreter of collective dreams that the philosopher attributed to the collector, who is capable of calling the wake-up, and on the specificity of the possession and decommoditization of objects by the collector.
During field research in the Záhorie region the collector Karol Plicka (1894 – 1987) was impressed by the singer Eva Studeničová from the village of Moravský Svätý Ján. Although he published only a small fragment of the songs (43 records), the song collection Eva Studeničová Sings (1928) is the first song monograph in Slovakia on an important bearer of the song tradition. The reconstruction of the complete song repertoire which the collector recorded from this singer relied on both manuscript and published records. The result was a repertoire amounting to 209 songs gathered from this singer. Apart from that, 88 song records which Plicka recorded from other singers in the village have been identified. Together with the songs from Eva Studeničová’s repertoire, this makes a corpus totalling 297 songs, which Plicka documented in this locality.
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