When the oracles leave the temple

A seventeen-year-old literary weekly and a seventy-eight-year-old literary and artistic monthly will soon celebrate round anniversaries - anniversaries of impetuous and restless activity. They have always been central organs, but they have never so spontaneously and penetratingly embraced Slovak (and not only Slovak) literary thought and artistic practice as in recent years, or more precisely after the historic XXII Congress of the CPSU. Both "Kultruny život" and "Slovenske pohlady" increasingly feature insightful synthetic reviews of the literary process from the East and the West; their pages reveal ever new spheres, daring and manifestations of restless creative thought. Even with their external design, alien to false posture and abstraction and to static and anachronistic naturalism, the two Slovak periodicals remind us of their internal appearance. In this summarized review, I will follow only individual episodes from the broad exchange of views and polemics on contemporary Slovak poetry, prose, and the relationship between contemporary art and traditional realism in Kulturni život and in the journal Slovenske pohlády during the first half of this year. Of course, these conversations and polemics did not begin or end during the half-year under study. However, to expect final resolutions would mean not understanding the nature of the new revivalist literary-critical ferment, which, although it has some beginning, does not promise to end soon. The history of Slovak literary criticism is closely connected with the history of poetry. Only a small percentage of Slovak literary critics were without poetic ambitions. The Slovak classic, the prose writer Jan Kalinčiak from the middle of the last century revealed his critical mind not in his fiction practice, but in poetry. Svetozar Vajansky, a poet and prose writer from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was primarily a critic of poetry. The critical ideal also originated from this time: "Good criticism is a key that opens the doors of the temple; it is more than good, leading you by the hand inside the temple! A key - a clever and a locksmith. Since the beginning of our century, and especially in the 1920s and 1930s, individual prominent critics such as František Votruba and Aleksandar Matuška have been creating the theory of Slovak prose, they know how to read this prose. After them, others come who do not know how to read poetry, but who analyze prose insightfully.