K pokusom o súčasný slovenský historický román

The Current Attempts at Writing a Slovak Historical Novel

Memory is one of the major biopsychical abilities of every human being. As it is a precondition of every creative process, memory can also act as an aesthetic object. Cultural memory as an institutionalized form of collective memory is becoming one of the major topical sources in world literature around 2000. Besides literary science, the research of memory is becoming prominent in whole social sciences and the tendency is becoming observable on either global or national scale. In the last fifteen years, Slovak literature has been characterized by an increasing number of longer fictional texts thematising modern European history. This movement can be perceived as a reaction to international trends and can be observed in the production as well as the perception of literary texts. Slovak literature is characterized by more than fifty-year long tradition of short fictional forms (short stories, novellas, etc.), whereas novels were considered as rather exceptional. Anyhow, mostly extraliterary phenomena were highly influential in this current movement. The recent significant rise of far-right extremism in European countries became one of the most important reasons for such a reaction. There is a noticeable social imperative to react on such tendencies in times when the last eyewitnesses of Holocaust and World War II pass away. Because the clerical fascist Slovak State served as a client state of Nazi Germany in WWII, the need for re-evaluation of modern Slovak history is even more prominent. The ability to perceive this historical period objectively was suppressed by following forty years of the totalitarian socialist establishment. Although the period after November 1989 gave Slovak authors freedom to perceive modern history without any ideological restrictions and with necessary time for re-evaluation, it is still debatable if their attempts to write distinguished historical novel were successful. This article introduces the literary tendency in its complexity. It lists the most important authors of the movement and the analytical part consists of critical interpretations of three contemporary Slovak writers – Pavol Rankov, Peter Krištúfek and Silvester Lavrík.