Oldal 433 [433]
OCR
IVANA TARANENKOVÁ gradually turned secular. Instead of wholeness and integration, it championed differentiation and individuality, eventually resulting in disintegration and fragmentation (society or self).° An explicit rejection of these trends formed a key component of the selfidentifying strategies of emergent Slovak culture. Its representatives strove to create a type of culture directly opposed to the Western model. They were driven by a conviction, based on Hegel’s and Herder’s teleological concept of history, which posited that embracing and submitting to another cultural model would enable Slovak culture to achieve greater potential and move to a higher level of historical development. Influenced by ideological trends prevalent in nineteenth-century Russian philosophy and literature, Slovak culture embraced the “Eastern” or “Slavonic” paradigm. Slavonic culture was believed to be diametrically opposed to its Western counterpart and thus predestined to fulfil a historical mission. Russophilia and the idea of Slavonic unity began to make inroads into Slovak culture in the mid-nineteenth century, as a reaction to the failure of the political aspirations of the revolutionary years 1848-1849. The concept of a Slavonic literary mutuality, forged by Jan Kollar in the early nineteenth century, was highly influential in this respect. However, Ludovit Stur’s essay Slavdom and the World of the Future, composed in German and published in 1867 in a Russian translation, played a key role in the establishment of this concept. Though not published in Slovak until 1993, Stür’s essay was widely known in Slovak intellectual circles and its principal theses influenced key tenets of cultural, national and political thinking until the turn of the century. A negative reading of the term “modern” goes back to cultural and aesthetic ideas, developed in the 1830s partly under the influence of Hegel’s philosophy. The “modern” and modernity — with its doctrine of novelty, change and progress — was unambiguously identified with Western culture and its subsequent rejection became a staple of the dominant ideological and cultural discourse. The cultural and social phenomena associated with modernity were perceived as extreme or excessive, posing a threat to the achievement of the ideal of a national culture, its homogeneity and complexity. The basic starting point for the initiation efforts of the nineteenth-century Slovak national revivalist culture can thus be said to be defined in opposition to the modern. We can say that it was based on the principle of the classic model of culture. What we see here is a juxtaposition of the principle of the whole and the individual, of harmony and excess. This opposition was manifested not only in the sphere of ideology but also affected the arts, literature in particular. 8 See Jiirgen Habermas: Modernity — An Incomplete Project of Modernity, translated by Seyla Ben-Habib, in Hal Foster (ed.): The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, London: Bay Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 1983, 3-16. + 432 +
