EN
This study examines the internal complexity of Slovak literary realist discourse, which is explained in Slovak studies as the result of diverse relations to the heterogeneous artistic, cultural and ideological discourses of the last third of the 19th century. However, since realistic fiction forms a subsystem of art as a social system (Niklas Luhmann), attention is focused on communications with other social systems and corresponding stimuli, and on the specific (self-referential) literary operations (with their inevitable contingency) involved in the construction of a view of reality. In order to illustrate these communicative exchanges, the final section uses two short interpretations to give examples of different modes of the (literary-) realist interdiscursive construction of reality – voluntarist (in the fiction by Svetozár Hurban Vajanský) and deterministic (in the context of the short stories by Ladislav Nádaši).