Georgi Valchev

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.

Taking his place among the greatest humanist writers of the 20th century, Karel Čapek is still insufficiently studied. European educated and gifted with a flexible analytical mind, this "terrible child" of Slavism from the lineage of the great French rationalists-mockers often escapes the literary criticism cutter, mainly due to the deceptive simplicity of his artistic manner. Everything is supposedly in order: the images - images, albeit slightly caricatured, the plots - plots with all their criminal twists, the language - emphatically pure and clear, and then, as if out of nowhere, you are grabbed by an insidious subtext that makes you "suspicious" of the author's real intentions. The mystery "what exactly does he want to tell us", which in turn arises in each of his works, is even more intensified by his undetermined, albeit generally humane political position. If we add the aesthetic diversity of Čapek's work, it will become clear why so many contradictory opinions, misunderstandings, and even erroneous opinions have accumulated around him.

The 5th International Congress of Slavists is a "Slavistic Olympiad" in the figurative definition of Dr. Karol Rosenbaum from the Institute of Slovak Literature. And for all those Czechoslovak Delegates who told the press about their impressions. For Prof. Fr. Burianek, Prof. F. Vodichka, for Acad. Jul. Dolansky and Acad. A. Mraz, the Congress was a monumental forum of international Slavic science; Monumental in the number of participants, in the hospitality of the hosts, with its numerous sections and subsections, and a wide range of topics and issues. By revealing the external monumentality of this "comprehensive" Congress - against a constant background of their fascination with our country and our people - our Czechoslovak friends at the same time point out the negative sides of this external monumentality, give recommendations for necessary qualitative changes for the work of the next 6th Slavic Congress, which will take place, as is known, in Prague and Bratislava. And from now on it is quite obvious that the Czechoslovak hosts will make sure that the thematic and problematic quantity does not atomize the scientific conversations and that the ground is generally created for a focused, creative discussion.

TODAY, and apparently since yesterday, it is almost unknown in our country. We do not know the essence and functions of Czech and Slovak literary criticism, we do not know about its relations to literary theory and history and, of course, to aesthetics, as well as to sociology, psychology and philosophy, about its connections to cultural policy and the social situation. And the long-standing disputes and polemics, especially of the last ten years, would tell us a lot about its subject, method and criterion, about the contribution of literary critics, with a unique creative expression and with a sharp eye for general and characteristic tendencies of literary development in Czechoslovakia. It is necessary to present in our country this complex of problems of contemporary Czech and Slovak literary and critical thought, at least in the most characteristic creative expressions. It is naive to assume that it can be revealed in separate, moreover, so sporadic, reviews and surveys. Today, our access to authentic material can be facilitated by the History of Czechoslovak Literary Criticism, by a significant number of anthologies with selected articles, essays, critical and analytical studies by prominent Czechoslovak literary scholars and writers, and not least by the high literary-theoretical and critical level of today's Czech and Slovak literary journals."

This is the title of a publication of the Institute of World Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. At the risk of presenting the author one-sidedly and (D. Durišin) I do not comment on the introductory part, the author's dialogue with new and newest authorities of world comparative literature (Van Tighemm, Volman, Žirmunski, Neupokoeva, Bakoš, Petrus and a number of others). It is also impossible to show the specific, analytical material on the basis of which the author builds a logically coherent concept. More important to me are those new trends and initiatives with which this Slovak publication could stimulate analogous spheres of comparative, and in particular comparative Slavic literary studies in our country.

The advent of the Belarusian novel in the first half of the 1960s stimulated aesthetic and literary-critical thought in the BSSR. Numerous articles, reviews and monographs were written about the novel. Not only colleagues from the Institute of Literature and the Faculty of Philology in Minsk, but also novelist writers themselves showed a strong literary and scientific interest in this genre. More general studies also appeared, and first of all, volumes I and II of the History of Belarusian Soviet Literature, where a significant place is devoted to the novel. And literary Slavic studies in Soviet Belarus, having already shown a number of creative initiatives, intensively introduced comparative analysis, so rarely found in Belarusian literary studies.

For the first time, Kiril Hristov came into contact with the Czech cultural community in 1912. On a five-star street, a few steps from the famous old local "U flek" - one of the nests of Prague intellectuals, - in a nice house with a Gothic facade, in a neat apartment on the third floor I settled in two rooms... From the very first days, through the professor of literature Jelinek, son-in-law of the old Czech novelist Irasek, and through the secretary of the Slavic Society in Prague, Forman, I became acquainted with a number of Czech celebrities and was accepted into their circle and into their clubs as an equal. The newspapers gave information about my stay in Prague, several magazines presented my portrait, translations of my poems and biographical notes. ... While getting to know the beauty of ancient and modern Prague and establishing connections with a number of cultural figures and representatives of the Czech spirit, I also began to quickly learn the language. I had planned an anthology of Czech poetry from Vráhlický onwards, from which poet I had already made some translations.