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European Cultures in Leo Tolstoy’s Interpretation: Ambiguous and Unambiguous (on the Basis of the Sketch “Sevastopol in May” and the Novel “War and Peace”)
Views:322The article examines the embodiment of the interactions of Russian culture with French and German cultures in the course of global historical eventsin Tolstoy’s works. The review includes the Crimean War of 1853-1856 and the Patriotic War of 1812. The author analyzes the use of foreign language inclusions by the heroes of Tolstoyʼs works and the authorʼs assessment of them. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the ideas and images of European cultures, which help to express the worldview of the writer.
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A Witness of the Era: A New Biography of Slovak Writer Pavol Strauss (1912–1994): Ivan A. Petranský: Pavol Strauss a jeho 20. storočie [Pavol Strauss and his 20th century]. Bratislava, Marenčin PT, 2025, 572 p. ISBN: 978-80-5569-1379-6
Views:72Petranský’s book Pavol Strauss a jeho 20. storočie [Pavol Strauss and his 20th century] is a comprehensive biography of the eminent Slovak poet Pavol Strauss (1912–1994), an essayist and aphorist who had been associated with Catholic literary circles since 1946. Pavol Strauss came from a Jewish, intellectual family. From his childhood, he showed an aptitude for literature and music. In the 1930s, he completed his medical studies at a German university in Prague, where he also made his literary debut with two volumes of poetry in German. Before the World War II, he returned to Slovakia, where he began working as a doctor. In the early 1940s, he was baptised into the Catholic faith, which may have saved him from the Holocaust, and in the mid-1940s he began writing in Slovak. He chose to become a Slovak writer, combining literature with his work as a surgeon in hospitals.
In the late 1940s, he was persecuted by the security services. He was subject to a ban on publication in Slovakia for almost the rest of his life. He published sporadically in Slovak Catholic publications and in Rome. Despite the repression, he continued to write and became increasingly respected within literary circles. In the 1970s and 1980s, he also became involved in the Catholic samizdat movement.
Petranský’s biography draws on numerous previously unknown sources, including material from family archives, the security services’ archives, and the Vatican archives. Petranský paints a highly detailed picture of the era of totalitarianism and the situation of a man living by moral principles that remained unshaken by the tragic events of the time. The portrait of the life of this poet and essayist, whose work was only recognised after his death, is also a portrait of Slovakia’s post-war history. Strauss began his life as a citizen of Austria–Hungary and ended it as a citizen of independent Slovakia. He witnessed great historical changes and bore witness to them in his work. Today, he ranks among the most outstanding Slovak writers associated with the Catholic movement. -
On the Reception of the Poem The Twelve by Aleksandr Blok in German Criticism and Literature Studies of the Past 50 Years
Views:340The article examines the German reception of Alexander Blok’s poem “The Twelve” based on selected criticism and works of literary history published by Slavists, poets and translators during the last fifty years. Analyses and interpretations of the poem are presented in detail, while other post-1917 writings and statements by Blok are also mentioned in order to provide context.
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Books have their own fate…: Gregor, Ferenc: A szlovák nyelv magyar elemei [The Hungarian elements of the Slovak language]. Budapest, Kairosz Kiadó, 2023, pp. 953. ISBN: 978-963-514157-9
Views:269Ferenc Gregor, the most prominent Hungarian researcher of the Slovak language, did not live to see the publication of his magnum opus. The present review has two goals: on the one hand, to commemorate an outstanding scholar who persevered on his own path in the pursuit of scholarly value, accepting all the difficulties of a lonely struggle, and whose efforts were crowned with success, albeit posthumously, thanks to the next generation of scholars; and, on the other hand, to draw attention to the significant linguistic and cultural influence that Hungarian dialects have had on the language of the Slovaks living in the northern region of the historical Kingdom of Hungary. This influence manifested itself in several waves and in several geographical regions and took on different thematic characteristics depending on the historical situation. Using a wide range of written sources, Ferenc Gregor identified nearly 1,000 Hungarian lexemes in the vocabulary of local variants of the Slovak language. Since Gregor accurately documented all cases where the Hungarian words in question also entered other Slavic languages of the Carpathian Basin, his work is significant not only for its outstanding value in contact linguistics, but also from an areal linguistic perspective.
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The Psychology of Literary Creativity in the Works of Mihail Arnaudov
Views:251Mihail Petrov Arnaudov (1878-1978), a Bulgarian scientist, was a famous European researcher with significant contributions to several fields of scholarship, i.e., folklore, the history of Bulgarian literature of the Renaissance, comparative literary history, the literature and culture of ancient India, the theory of literary science, the history of German and French literature of Romanticism, etc. This paper is devoted to his contribution to the study of the psychology of literary creativity. It analyses the prerequisites for Arnaudov’s formation as a psychologist of creativity, and provisionally identifies several main stages in his scientific and professional path, during which he conducted research and produced works in this interdisciplinary field. With the help of historical and psychological analysis, the general and specific features in the development of his views on the essence of the psychology of creativity and the meaning of its use in literary criticism and literary history are presented.
