This article examines the Danube as a site of cultural memory and exploration, focusing on the descriptions of Bratislava as seen by British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in A Time of Gifts (1977) and Italian literary scholar Claudio Magris in Danubio (1986; Danube , 1989). For both Leigh Fermor, who saw it in the 1930s, and Magris, who visited the city in the 1980s, Bratislava serves as a border between the familiar West and the exotic East, and as a site of nostalgia for what Magris describes as “a multiple and supranational culture [koiné]”. When seen in relation to the debate over Central European identity in the 1980s, both narratives look to the Slovak capital’s multilingual past as a sign of its “margin centric” history, but Leigh Fermor’s trilogy has largely been overlooked by theorists of Danubian culture, while Magris has been accused of complicity with the forces of oppression (from Habsburg to Communist) described in his work.
The Ottoman invasions are among the most significant historical events in Central European literature as well as popular culture. An important example is the legendary „well of love“ at Trenčín Castle, supposedly dug by the Turkish Omar in order to free his beloved Fatima, held in captivity by Stephen Zápolya. Despite its setting in the 1490s, this story was first published in German in the early nineteenth century by Hungarian nobleman Alois Freiherrn von Mednyánszky, which inspired Slovak poetic adaptations of this tale by Karol Štúr (1844) and Mikuláš Dohnány (1846). The narrative was popularized in several collections of „historical“ tales set in Slovakia’s castles by twentieth-century authors such as Ľudovít Janota, Jozef Branecký, Jozef Horák and Ján Domasta, as well as in Jozef Nižnánsky’s historical novel The Well of Love (1935), which provides a concrete political background for the legend. Although the story’s events and characters (other than Zápolya) are fictional, it remains today one of the most enduring love stories in Slovak culture. This article will analyse the textual development of this legend in relation to evolving definitions of national identity over the last two centuries.
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The Turkish comic folk hero Nasreddin Hodja is known across the Muslim and former Ottoman world, but he also has a unique place in modern Slavic literatures (Russian, Bosnian/Serbian, Bulgarian, and Czech). What is interesting in each of these works is the way that this character has been adapted as a transcultural icon, transforming his medieval Islamic spirit into something suitable for modern national literatures while preserving his essential comic qualities. Nasreddin’s Slavic “afterlife” is not simply a forerunner of literary globalization. It also shows how exotic figures allow expanded freedom of expression under various forms of cultural repression.
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