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IVANA TARANENKOVÁ and poetry of Vajansky). Another important aspect of the aforementioned attitude towards Modernity was a discreet and melancholic distance, which is present, most prominently, in the work of Kukucin. His short stories, novellas and novels offered an idyllic representation of the traditional and archaic values of rural communities. They also showed that this world belonged to the past and was disappearing due to the irreversible forces of progress. This awareness of unavoidable changes to individual lives but also to the life of societies was accompanied by a pronounced melancholy and nostalgia. Keywords: Slovak culture and literature of the nineteenth century, National Revival, Modernity, Utopia, Idyll, Nostalgia, Melancholia In the course of the nineteenth century, Slovak culture was shaped by the ongoing process of the National Awakening. Various currents within this process aimed to transform the Slovaks from a mere ethnic group into a modern nation and establish its culture within the European context. The emergent culture evolved gradually, asserting its identity, complexity and continuity. Its beginnings date back to the 1840s, specifically the year 1843, which marks a seminal event, that of the codification of the written form of the Slovak language. Henceforth the language would be used to produce works of literature and culture. While other European cultures had undergone the same process earlier, in Slovakia it started later and lasted almost until the early years of the twentieth century. Slovak culture in the nineteenth century — characterised as it was by a discontinuity in efforts and achievements as well as a continuity that emerged only slowly, indeed sometimes as an arbitrary artefact — is perfectly aligned with the concept of revivalist cultures, as developed by Czech literature scholar Vladimir Macura in his book Signs of Birth (Znameni zrodu, first published in 1985). The book explores the relatively new cultures of small nations whose evolution may be regarded as “hobbled and complex”? and whose main aim was achieving the “ideal of an undivided, ‘full’ national culture”.* Writing about the National Revival, Macura speaks of “miraculousness” and “implausibility”.* He points to a feature of the National Revival process occurring in the awareness of its main actors right from its outset, namely the fact that the very event of the National Revival, as manifested in the codification of Slovak as a written language and resulting in a series of further literary, cultural and social initiatives, is a historic moment which appears out of the blue from the given paradigm of reality, resisting the established ? Vladimir Macura: Zuameni zrodu, Praha, H&H, 1995, 13. Ibidem, 14. * Ibid., 5. * 430 +
