Handbook of Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust Fiction is a work in progress aiming at becoming a standard reference work addressed to universities and public libraries and the broader public. It includes novels, short stories, poems and plays written in Polish, Czech and Slovak within the scope of 650 standard pages. The table of contents consists of 53 articles focused on Polish, 45 articles on Czech, and 23 articles on Slovak literature. The editors provide an introduction about the main developments of Holocaust literature in the broader context of three lands: crucial topics, situations, characters, motifs and places, periodization due to political changes, reception processes in the national and transnational context. The Handbook aims primarily at the researchers and readers in Western Europe and the U.S. where the Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust fiction remains largely unknown. The project results from the cooperation among researchers from Polish, Czech, German and Slovak universities. This article presents two entries from Polish and Czech literature.

The World of the New Myth: Sestra by Jáchym Topol

Sestra by Jáchym Topol is one of the most important Czech novels, which were published after the year 1989. It describes the new reality of the 1990s as a generational experience with the distinctive mythological features. The paper will be an attempt to describe the process of the mythologization of the fictional world and to indicate its distinguishing features and means of creation of myth-like universe. A special attention is directed to the questions of the intertextual links between Topol’s novel and a poem Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire and the problem of literary Cubism.

Montenegro imagined. Martin Kukučín’s travel journal In Dalmatia and Montenegro

The article is devoted to the first part of the Balkan travel journal entitled Travel Features, written by the Slovak prose writer Martin Kukučín 1898. The text deals with the image of Montenegro in the context of the tension between its stereotypical and real image. Montenegro is studied here in the context of the cognitive triangle: landscape – femininity – masculinity. Kukučín looks at the most fundamental stereotypes and self-stereotypes about Montenegro, such as the myth of heroism, amputated femininity or the harshness and inaccessibility of the Montenegrin landscape. In his tale, on the basis of a palimpsest, elements intricate and problematizing the unambiguous image of Montenegro are woven.

How Do We Recognize Marxism?

The title of the study is a paraphrase of Gilles Deleuze’s inspiring work How Do We Recognize Structuralism? (1974). The explanation proceeds in three steps. First, the author – following Wolfgang Iser’s conception – defines the relevant differences between ‘discourse’ and ‘theory’ (W. Iser). Second, he presents Marxism as a discoursive ideal type (Max Weber’s Idealtyp) that characterizes several (seven) distinctive features: (i) totality, (ii) dialectics, (iii) base and superstructure, (iv) materialism and historization, (v) subjective and objective, (vi) true and inevitable, (vii) revolutionary practice. In the third chapter of his study, the author briefly formulates a wider sociological context; inspired by the concepts of Shmuel Eisenstadt and Cornelius Castoriadis, he defines Marxism as one of the discourses articulating the cultural project of modernity and as part of a permanent process of ‘social self-production’.

* Tekst powstał w ramach projektu GA ČR 17-22913S, „Český literárněvědný marxismus: Nový pohled”.

Autobiographism in Ján Rozner’s Prosaic Works – Selected Issues

The paper focuses on autobiographical aspects of Ján Rozner’s prose, which was published in Slovakia after his death (2006), and soon became a great literary sensation. In three books: Sedem dnído pohrebu (Seven Days to the Funeral, 2009), Noc po fronte (The Night after the Front, 2010), Výlet na Devín (The Trip to the Devín Castle, 2011) Rozner, a leading communist journalist and critic of the 1950s, then one of the active proponents of the Prague Spring’s democratization process, thrown out of work and blacklisted after the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia in 1968, finally in emigration in Germany after 1976 –combines individual problems with social and cultural issues making a specific interpretation of his own life, his intimate affairs and political choices. His writing can be considered as a kind of therapeutic process, especially the novel Seven Days to the Funeral, in which the author deals with death of his wife, Zora Jesenská, distinguished translator, mainly from the Russian literature. In the article the novel is interpreted as a literary attempt to cope with the pain caused by the great loss, but also as a kind of engaged, subjective reflection on history and politics with its devastating impact on people’s lives.

Poetics of Violence in the Novel Vomito negro by Pavel Hak

The intention of this paper is to give a coherent, and possibly complete interpretation of violence representation in Pavel Hak’s novel Vomito negro, and to argue the thesis that the analysed text is an emblematic expression of a new vision of literature, namely “effective literature”. Drawing on the approach proposed by the postcolonial studies, the analysis conducted here aims to explore violence present in Hak’s novel in order to give a novel insight into the techniques of textualizing this phenomenon. The study is divided into two parts –expository that intends to present the author, his concept of literature, and features symptomatic for his literary texts; and analytical in which Vomito Negro is explored in the light of the main thesis argued in the paper. Finally, conclusive remarks introduce an opening to further interpretations of Hak’s literary texts.