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cracks in order." Thus, in nineteenth-century Slovak culture melancholy
and nostalgia represent a “negative reality"" in which are reflected ambitions
and contradictions that reach far beyond their period.
All of this is also present in the literary output of canonical figures of Slovak
literature of the last third of the nineteenth century, Vajansky, Hviezdoslav
and Kuku¢in.” Ironically, all these authors, regarded as key representatives of
literary realism, in their work turned their back on their own time in favour of
a world that did not exist in the present. Recognising that such a world could
not be taken for granted, they suffered from a constant sense of loss.
In the case of Vajansky this was a world in which national life could be fully
regenerated once obstacles were overcome; for Hviezdoslav, it was the ideal
of universal justice or the ideal world of poetry, from which one is constantly
cast back into crude reality. These two authors set their sights on a (near)
future or transcendent world in which their ideal was supposed to come true.
Martin Kukucin, on the other hand, stayed rooted in an irretrievably lost past
that he had repeatedly to recreate in his fiction. Ultimately, he was one of the
very few nineteenth-century Slovak authors who succeeded in transcending
the ideological limitations of Slovak literature and touching upon universal
questions of human existence.
Martin Kukucin kept harking back to a “Golden Age” that was not just the
mythical era of the Slovaks but also the place of his childhood. However, this
place was located in the past, a past that was fast disappearing under the pressure
of cultural and civilizational change. Kukucin’s melancholy and nostalgia
were brought about by two factors we might call the infantile-archaic and the
evolutionary. The infantile-archaic aspect is represented by a fixation on the
community’s “Golden Age” or, in the case of an individual’s life, on childhood;
while the evolutionary one reflects the inevitability of progress, change and
adulthood. In his fiction, there is present a subtle sense of loss and sadness,
albeit often disguised as a humorous take on everyday life in the Slovak village.
Nevertheless, in the overall context of nineteenth century Slovak culture,
melancholy and nostalgia have actually proved to be culturally productive
since, in the circumstances of a literature that stressed the collective ego,
they focused on the individual. This individual was sometimes represented by
the figure of the intellectual misunderstood by “his own people” (Vajansky,
Hviezdoslav), or someone whom cultural change had robbed of his native
environment and background, alienating him and preventing him from
15 Läszlö F. Földenyi: Melankélia, Kalligram, Pozsony, 2003, 301.
16 “We might as well regard melancholy as a negative imprint of the everyday: everything
that is hidden in the former is articulated in the latter while that which occurs as a mere
possibility in reality becomes an elaborated “negative” reality [...] showing the world from
the opposite perspective.” (Ibid, 190)
Martin Kukucin (1860-1928) fiction writer, regarded as the “chronicler” of Slovak village
life.
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