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AGAINST PROGRESS: UTOPIA, IDYLL, NOSTALGIA AND MELANCHOLY finding a new home (Kukud¢in). It is the melancholic and nostalgic elements that question identity, the relationship between the individual and the collective, the fragmented and the whole, the will, creativity and passivity, from perspectives that bring these authors, located as they are on the boundary of two eras, closer to the mood and trends of cultural and artistic modernity. Moreover, it is just as indicative that by amplifying this mode of melancholy and nostalgia and by moving further towards scepticism and disillusionment, key turn-of-the-century Slovak authors (Bozena SlancikovaTimrava, Jozef Gregor Tajovsky, Janko Jesensky, and Ivan Krasko) came to reassess the concept of Slovak literature and culture forged by the National Revival, and to embrace modernity. We can thus say that throughout the nineteenth century, until its very end, the narrative of Slovak literature and culture was not just one of national and cultural emancipation but also represented a — possibly quite protracted — transition to the modern. Translated by Julia Sherwood REFERENCES Boy, Svetlana: The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, 2001. Brooks, Peter: The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven — London, Yale University Press, 1995. CALINESCU, Matei: Five Faces of Modernity. Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Durham, Duke University Press, 1987. F. FÖLDÉNYI, László: Melankélia, Kalligram, Pozsony, 2003. GIFFORD, Terry: Pastoral, London and New York, Routledge, 1999. HABERMAS, Jiirgen: 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. Macura, Vladimir: Znameni zrodu, Praha, H&H, 1995. ZIZEK, Slavoj: Event, London, Penguin Random House UK, 2014. * 437 +
