The article is concerned with literary representations of everyday life in the novella by the Slovak author Mikuláš Štefan Ferienčík (1825 – 1881) Bratia ([Brothers] 1863). The novella critically addresses Romantic idealism which was at that time – in the 1860s – already perceived as outdated and lacking function and presents the reader with a new type of nationally conscious individual: a family-oriented middle class man, successful in his career and respected by the society. The protagonist of the novella does not understand his national identity as an abstract spiritual value, but makes it a part of everyday situations (during meals, events, in shaping family relationships). By doing so, he also helps build national awareness in other characters in the novella. M. Š. Ferienčík not only offers his readers a practical example of how to combine personal happiness with the imperative of building the national society, but also a new solution to the key problem of Slovak Romanticism – “the embracement of the spirit and matter”. The article draws on the category of everyday life as conceptualised by the American literary scholar Rita Felski. In her view, everyday life is a sphere of human activities characterised by the domestic space, cyclical time and the modality of habit.
Marína Miloslava Hodžová (1842 – 1920), the eldest daughter of the priest, national revivalist intellectual, and poet Michal Miloslav Hodža, was known in Slovak nationalist circles in the second half of the 19th century as an actress, organiser of educational and cultural events, teacher, and her father’s helper. However, she is also the author of a rather extensive correspondence, a significant part of which consists of letters addressed to the editor, novelist, and politician Viliam Pauliny-Tóth (1826 – 1877). The corpus the article studies consists of the published collection of Hodžová’s letters. However, the letters are perceived here not only as sources of historical facts, but also as representations of a specific literary genre. Methodologically, the author of the article draws on a combination of two approaches: research into letter-writing which views letters as communicative media with a fictional and aesthetic potential and gender studies that refers to the gendered contexts of literary production and the social structures of the national community. The article focuses on literary representations of the self in Hodžová’s correspondence and the motifs and attitudes she adopts from the national movement discourse. The author aims to contribute to the discussions of the position, possibilities and limitations of women in the Slovak national movement in the 1860s.
The paper focuses on Slovak prose written in the 1860s. The first part maps the social and cultural context of literary production and the state of the national emancipation process which received new impulses in the new political situation during the period of time between the end of absolutism and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867. The other part of the paper pays attention to social novellas written by Mikuláš Štefan Ferienčík (1825 – 1881), Daniel Bachát (1840 – 1906), Viliam Pauliny-Tóth (1826 – 1877) and Štefan Križan (1826 – 1894), which comply with new requirements laid down on prose, namely to entertain, to attract and to educate the bourgeois audience as well as to address their national awareness. The works of prose mentioned above feature an idyllic topos characteristic of the 19th century Slovak literary discourse. It either has a form of a „lovely place“ in a remote forest settlement which keeps the world of civilization at a distance or a „happy home“ which stays in a close contact with it. Despite certain remnants of romantic poetics, which may be disclosed in representations of an idyllic topos, the writings present a rather Biedermeier-like attitude towards the reality: the ordinary is shown as a celebration or a ritual, they try to establish harmony between the idyllic place and the outer world, the community of a family or friends is depicted as a place that is a guarantee of moral values and national freedom.
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