The essay is an interpretation of Walter Benjamin's 'Passages' from the theological angle. It tries to determine the specificity of Benjamin's religious convictions which seem to combine in a highly idiosyncratic way the elements of German Romanticism, Jewish Messianism, and Gnosticism. The main focus of the analysis is the concept of allegory, formerly elaborated by Benjamin in 'Origins of the German Tragic Drama', however now applied to the Marxist idiom of commodity fetishism and reification. In Benjamin's view, as emerging from his vast work on Parisian passages, the whole world appears as fallen into a sleep of reification: there are no more subjects and objects (as it is still in Simmel, whose works Benjamin misreads and revises), only 'things' and their reciprocal interactions.'The inhabitants of a big city' (Simmel) acquire a thing-like condition: a flaneur watches the metropolitan spectacle with his indifferent 'stony gaze'; a Baudelaire's allegorist becomes 'petrified' under the influence of dead artifacts that surround him; and a collector leads his dreamy existence in an intimate relationships with material souvenirs that are more meaningful to him than relations with other people. Benjamin's question is how to wake up from the 'sleep of the 19th century', which for him indicates the deepest Fall into materiality, the very nadir of human history. By following the antinomian Gnostic logic of the Fall, he claims that the deeper the sleep, the more vivid the moment of a dream (reverie) which contains a vision of redemption: 'there is a spark of an eternal life in everything' that needs to be recovered. He thus presents his triad of flaneur, allegorist and collector as those bearers of 'the weak messianic power' who, by submerging themselves to the level of dead material things, try nonetheless to enkindle in them the saving 'living spark'.
The autoress in the study analyses a collection of the tales written by Jan Francisci 'Slovenske povesti' (Slovak Tales, 1845). This publication laid the foundations of tradition - how the folk prose subjects were creatively worked out in Slovakia. The foreword to the book is the first published text analysing the tales from the aspect of their culturally historical value. She deals several levels (problems) in the collection: genesis of the collection focusing mainly on authoress' approach to the folk subjects, Francisci's explanation of a tale and also culturally historical background of the tale's creation and its influence from the aspect of the history of literature. Further, the authoress identified three text-forming roles of Francisci: as author's subject (author of the tale 'Popolvar najvacsi na svete', 'Slnkovy kon' and 'Ruzova Anicka'), as editor's and redactor's subject in other texts. Concretization of the editorial improvements and changes in the texts of other authors (of Samuel, Adolf and Ludovit Reuss, Stefan Daxner, Jonatan Cipka, August Horislav Skultety) showed that Francisci realised them in agreement with his own conception of the tales declared in the foreword (with the title 'Bratia, rodaci!' - Brothers, Countrymen!), which tightly followed the public lectures of Ludovit Stur. Francisci received from him mainly the motive of cuss. Contrary to Stur he did not consider it for a thematic core of the tales, but he stressed its out-of-literary application - an allegory of the Slovak nation as elf-struck, cursed nation. In the background of that motive we reconstruct mechanism of creation of a literary type of 'Popolvar' (in literary transcription a secular hero-winner), who is in the Slovak romanticism, mainly in its Messianic wing, a particularly productive type of a romantic hero.
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The article deals with the pericope Gal 4.21-31 (thus it is delimited by the author) in which the apostle Paul once more uses arguments from the Old Testament to convince the recipients of the Letter of the right way to reach justification before God. Actual quotations of the Old Testament are only in the verses 27 and 30. However, in the first part of the pericope (4.22-26) Paul alludes to the story of Abraham's two sons and two wives adding the interpretative key in v. 24: 'these things are said allegorically'. Although there is no consensus among authors in what sense Paul applies this principle to the biblical texts it is preferable to see here rather a typological approach than a pure allegory because Paul does not certainly deny a real story in the text of Genesis. However, for Paul the decisive factor in interpreting biblical texts was the person and life of Jesus Christ. In this light we must also see the quotations of Isa 54.1 in v. 27 and Gen 21.10 in v. 30, even though Paul may have been influenced by the reading of these biblical texts in Jewish liturgy. As for Paul, so for all true believers in Christ, the gift of the freedom Christ has brought must remain living.
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The paper critically examines three extremely successful examples of historical postmodernism in contemporary Serbian literature: Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), Radoslav Petković’s Destiny, Annotated (1993) and Goran Petrović’s The Siege of the Church of Holy Salvation (1997). All three novels take historical events as the basis of an archaeological narrative, but they also question the notion of history which itself is, of course, historical and political. Therefore, we have to (re)construct the context of the 1990s when nationalism needed a new “imagined community” ready to deal with the challenges of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, post communism and capitalism. Thus it seems that these novels invite magic realism as a possible way out from history, or even better, a way into a “new” history.
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The article examines the term parable as it is used in the New Testament (in Greek parabole) and in the interpretation of the Gospels. At first, the Czech usage is presented, followed by the terminology of the Bible. Then the understanding of this word as a literary term is explored, beginning with classical authors. Much attention is paid to what biblical scholarship has said about the parables of Jesus in the last more than hundred years since the influential work of A. Jülicher. We can see that the approaches to the parables have been very diverse so that the only consensus among modern scholars seems to be the fact that Jesus sometimes spoke in parables. However, this cannot lead to an arbitrary interpretation of Jesus' parables. In author's opinion, the working definition of A. J. Hultgren can be useful in practice: A parable is a figure of speech in which a comparison is made between God's kingdom, actions, or expectations and something in this world, real or imagined.
The paper is concerned with establishing the allegory of a cursed country in Slovak Romanticism, which is one of the defining signs in the works by the poets of the so-called Levoča School, however, their sphere of action was actually (as it is demonstrated in the material processed) considerably wider. The goal of the paper is to show when, in what way and through what mechanisms an originally neutral and general term, which was and still is an integral part of the language schemes (in the general sense, featuring a potentially implicit reference to the Bible – a curse), has transformed to one of the defining motifs of the Romantic topics, what way, in what forms and functions, it has become part of the mythic and poetic image (simile, symbol, allegory) and what mechanisms made it possible for the term to develop a form of one of the Slovaks´ best-known national myths.
In Yaroslava Koneva’s article Poetics of the body in Ukrainian folk songs (comparative research) the author considers corporeal semiosis of the space as well as analyses the body on the level of symbols, metaphors and allegories in erotic songs of the Ukrainians, Polish, Russians and Bulgarians.
The paper analyses a – yet not reflected on – prose by a marginal Romantic writer Leopold Abafi (1827 – 1883) Vidina a skutočnosť /Illusion and Reality/, which was published as a serial in the magazine Sokol (1860). It deals with one of the major topics of Slovak Romantics – love of your homeland and determination to give yourself over to it, while the reduced plot and the emphasized reflexive element in the text make the prose seem like reflexive lyrical Romantic poems about love of one´s nation, which are continually present in Slovak literature throughout the19th century from the 1830s. The text analysis and secondary information sources (correspondence) helped the author of the paper date the text at the second half of the 1840s and put it in the context of the literary works by the poets of the so-called Levoča circle, where – according to Oskár Čepan – the efforts of Slovak Romantic thinking to form the ´Slovak lad´ prototype culminate. She finds and interprets another context of the prose in autobiographic genres published in the second half of the century (Závaté, ale nezapomenuté listí Jozefa Miloslava Hurbana, Hidden but unforgotten leaves of Jozef Miloslav Hurban, Sokol 1862; Rozpomienky na dni peknej mladosti Daniela Maróthyho, Memories of the Days of Daniel Marothy´s Nice Youth, Orol 1873).
The article “From allegory to eschatology in Jan Karafiat’s Broučci: Pro male i velke děti” discusses the subject of the first authorial book for children from the second half of the 19th century, written by a Czech Evangelical pastor. In this literary piece of art we will find strong autobiographical influences and innovative literary trends, references to children’s way of perceiving the world on the psychological, linguistic and literary grounds. The article shows how the author managed to reflect the spiritual sphere of human life in an allegoric world of insects. The miniaturized world of fire flies is an allegoric tale on man’s way to God. Eschatology in Jan Karafiat’s book is understood as unconditional commitment to God in hope of eternal life. A theocentric character of this book is presented from the perspective of the Evangelical Reformed Church, promoting a harsh Calvinist notion of faith. The book, besides its theological implication, raises also transreligious values. For it is a literary Decalogue – a set of basic ethical principles, worth of every human being’s attention, regardless of the religion they practice, if any.
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The paper examines the possible intellectual role models that the three most prominent Hungarian romantic poets suggested either with the story of their life (and, in one case, death), or with the allegorical constructions in their poetry. In the background of this investigation is a distinctly Central-European consideration: for centuries in Hungary, most social, philosophical or even technological new ideas came from the oppressor, that is, Imperial Vienna. In this way, the 'Interest of the Nation' and the 'Interest of Progress' got into a contradictory relationship in Hungary. In the 'Reform Era' (1825-1848), this contradiction was partly and temporarily resolved by the idea of a 'National Romanticism'. The three poets, Mihaly Vorosmarty, Janos Arany and Sandor Petofi, shared a most decisive historical experience: the revolution and the war of independence of 1848-1849, which was overwhelmed by the joint Austrian-Russian forces. Petofi, the youngest, a symbolic figure even in his lifetime, was killed in action and thus became a heroic example for the coming generations. Vorosmarty, the oldest, lost his social status, his livelihood, and his faith: withdrawn from public life, in deep desperation he wrote some poems with unprecedented verbal intensity. Arany, who was a rather private family man, tried to survive the whole ordeal with the least possible harm to his way of life, and, more importantly, to his moral integrity. This search for a compromise that allows the intellectual to maintain moral integrity in a morally deficient and generally hostile environment while avoiding physical or social harm is very familiar from the 20th or 21st century viewpoint. In the 1850s, Arany tries to construct this stance in a several poems, of which the paper examines two historical ballads, 'The Bards of Wales' and 'The Two Pages of Szondi'. In addition, the author also analyzes Vorosmarty's last finished poem, 'The Old Gipsy', in which he addresses very similar ideas.
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