EN
The aim of the study is to depict character of the prose written as a historical genre in the first third of the 20th c. and to show how cultural memory was being created in that time through the fine literature. The author tries to follow the conception of the historical past through an analysis and interpretation of the proses by Martin Kukucin, Ladislav Nadasi Jege and Martin Razus; he dealt with a way how they were constructed as well as what was the functional intention of the proses. The author used Assman's concept as a methodological platform of the cultural memory as a past time worth of being remembered and he also used the results of his own research of the poetics of a historical genre he did in the beginning of 90s. The work showed that in the beginning of the 20th c. the Slovak literature had a part in construction of the collective identity through Vajansky's and Kukucin's proses from the 'present time'. It was a process of a literary plurality of the identities that could be identified as a modernistic signal in the Slovak prose. The excluding national concept of the identity lost a dominance in that and it was completed by identity of the village communities, families and the lineage and so on. The historical genre entered into this process in the 20s and 30s in the version based on the examples from the history (Kukucin and Razus) that are extension of the pragmatically mythological line of the historical prose having started in the Slovak romanticism and in a version of history as a proof of the eternal pulsation of the human beings substance between the animal and cultivated behaviour (Jege). The key result of the study is a confirmation of pragmatic orientation of the proses of Kukucin and Razus and explicitly formulated polemic instruction of Jege's historical proses opposite to the domestic romanticist tradition. This polemic is evident not only in the level of topics but also in the way how Jege works with the conventional generic schemes.