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AGAINST PROGRESS: UTOPIA, IDYLL, NOSTALGIA AND MELANCHOLY
order of things and fundamentally transforming it. The existence of the
Slovak National Revival, its key figures, initiatives and activities, aspiring
to the transformation of an ethnic group into a modern nation with its
own homogeneous culture, can indeed in this context be interpreted as an
Event, not just in a historical but also a philosophical sense. The philosopher
Slavoj Zizek characterizes this type of Event as “the surprising emergence
of something new which undermines every stable scheme." This event is
the “signifier, which structures an entire field of meaning”, causing “radical
politic ruptures” and representing “a change of the very frame through which
we perceive the world and engage with it”’. However, an essential element in
the emergence of such an event is an awareness that it cannot be taken for
granted, and amazement that such a thing could have happened at all and that
in a place where nothing had existed before, there was suddenly something.
Key figures of the nascent Slovak culture were confronted with the absence
of historicity, direct cultural traditions and, last but not least, with the actual
non-existence of a nation on whose behalf the entire process of the National
Revival had been carried out. One of the responses to this non-existence was
the creation or invention of a tradition, a mythopoeic narrative of national
beginnings that may never have existed, as well as a reading of historical
events that was meant to furnish evidence of traces of “Slovakness” in a past
that was supposed to be fully realized in the future.
Throughout this period, Slovak culture had to grapple not only with
parallel and competing nationalisation processes (Hungarian and Czech,
to mention only two) but also with the disruption and discontinuity that
characterised this process. That is why the assertion of Slovak cultural and
ethnic homogeneity also involved the exclusion and rejection of everything
that might have been regarded as being at odds with it. The “whole” and
“wholeness”, emphasizing the collective to the detriment of the individual,
became key concepts in cultural manifestos that advocated the cultural and
national project. This approach significantly affected and shaped the various
emergent cultural and national activities, leading to the rejection of anything
that did not conform or went counter to the imperative of unity and that
might have jeopardized the achievement of the goals that had been set.
In Slovak culture these tendencies were most clearly visible in its attitudes
to cultural modernity. As a result of the dynamic evolution of modernist
tendencies in Western Europe, which began during the Enlightenment and
encompassed the entire nineteenth century, the holistic society of the West
5 Slavoj Zizek: Event, London, Penguin Random House UK, 2014, 6.
6 Ibid. 6.
7 Ibid. 10.
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