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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 premodern 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 selfregulating 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) ° 435 +
