Oldal 436 [436]
AGAINST PROGRESS: UTOPIA, IDYLL, NOSTALGIA AND MELANCHOLY
the creation of a coherent cultural and national whole, and also in terms of
aesthetics, with a holistic, classic (in fact, Aristotelian) model of art being
championed, one that was supposed to make visible the essence, the idea.
However, in canonical texts of Slovak literature we can also discern another
kind of relationship to cultural modernity, one that focuses on the past. It
derives from the literary construct of a “Golden Age”, a “primordial past in
which human anxieties had not yet surfaced”’’, an idyllic prehistoric and pre¬
modern world located in the countryside or nature, which exemplified the
archaic values of the Slovak “people” as an ethnic group. This anthropological
dimension is ultimately present in every culture.
However, the category of “the people” further played a key role by providing
the ideological foundation for the National Revival project. In this context
“the people” act as an element that helped to preserve its national “selfhood”
and its moral values, albeit, at this stage, only in the form of ethnic specificity.
“The people” had to undergo the process of national awakening in order to
grow into a confident nation, with the “avant-garde” — that is, the “nationally
oriented” intellectual elite — playing the role of subject in this process. Works
of literature produced in this period thus not only made use of mythopoeia
but also of the ideological potential of the Slovak “people”, with the dominant
mode of literary representation being the idyll: a world governed by self¬
regulating processes that shape the relations between man, his environment,
and tradition.
In the case of utopia and idyll, we are dealing with worlds that are yet to
be created or have become extinct. That is why their relation to the present
is marked by melancholy and nostalgia“, a natural consequence of the
clash between the ideal and reality. Melancholy and nostalgia were a way of
reflecting on the absence of a lost or unrealized ideal world, but also of the
inevitability of progress and change. They stemmed from ruptures in positive
reality, present as an ideal in the efforts of individual key representatives of
Slovak literature and culture of this period. As the Hungarian aesthetician
László F. Foldényi notes in his book Melancholy: “Melancholy emerges not
from pure order (no such thing actually exists) but from the inevitable hidden
133 Terry Gifford: Pastoral, London and New York, Routledge, 1999, 21.
Inher book The Future of Nostalgia, literature scholar Svetlana Boym (Boym 2001, 7) speaks
of melancholy and nostalgia as historical emotions, both of which are, however, rooted
in culture rather than in history. While melancholy relates to the sphere of individual
consciousness, nostalgia concerns the relation between an individual’s biography and that of
a group of nations, the relation between individual and collective memory. Both phenomena
are linked to a fixation on something that has been irretrievably lost. (Ibid., xvi)
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