The article concentrates on interpreting Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav’s (1849 – 1921) ballads – the part of his oeuvre which has only been investigated marginally so far. His ballads from the late of the 19th and early 20th centuries (U kaplice [At the chapel], Zuzanka Hraškovie [Zuzanka Hraškovie], Anča [Anča], Margita [Margita], Studnica [The well], Smelá Katka [Daring Katka], Topeľci [Drowned], Jedlica [Fir tree], Krivoprísažník [False witness], Mladá vdova [Young widow], Matúš Stolár [Matúš Carpenter]) adapt some of the traditional themes of folk and Romantic ballads (crime and punishment, moral failure, folk customs), but also bring new motives (search for the spiritual path from pragmatic truth criteria, property disputes and unorthodox solutions to life problems, social and economic disparity and its effects). Comparison of Hviezdoslav’s ballads with those written by Slovak poets of the Romantic period Janko Kráľ and Ján Botto shows his authentic realist attitude in the handling of the genre. Hviezdoslav accentuated the epical side of the narratives, employing several means of representation (on the level of the narrator and on the level of the structure of the stanza and verse). He realised the lyrical side of the narratives, their balladic atmosphere – also through the functional structure of the verse – but primarily through expressive, lyrical depictions and commentaries.
Although Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (1849 – 1921) is probably the most well-known classic of Slovak literature, his work has not been researched in its entire complexity. The article offers an overview of literature on his work and discusses the differences between methodologically sound scholarship – including interpretations of Hviezdoslav’s work – and superficial affirmative biographies and compositional, structuralist versological, semantic and form-centred analyses. From the comparatist point of view, it addresses his early work in Hungarian and German, but also points to his literary criticism, dramatic works, and structured character of his poetics and the high artistic artifice of his depictive and expressive method. The article concludes with a set of topics and research areas which have not been sufficiently addressed and hopes to elicit more scholarly attention in them.
The aim of the study is a comprehensive analysis of the little-known dramatic fragment Na Luciu, written by the classic of Slovak literature Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav. The complexity of the applied approach lies in the use of several research methods (heuristic, comparative, analytical-synthetic), which are used to assess relevant facts of theoretical (the form-genre area of drama, romantic-realistic creative principle) and the material character (the circumstances of the creation of the dramatic fragment, the thematic background of its creation, the structural characteristics of the text).
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