BOOKS DISCOVERING CENTRAL EUROPE
some writers who had been able to save their face in socialism didn't really master the period of Mečiarism
literature can often surprise us in unexpected places, especially when it deviates from standards. In this context, the writer Ján Rozner’s book Seven days till the burial, published posthumously nearly twenty years after November ‘89, appeared rather unexpectedly. In this book – describing the seven days between the death and burial of Rozner's wife, the translator Zora Jesenská – Slovak literature partially expressed its reaction to the régime, a reaction that had been brewing for several years. YOUNG AUTHORS ARE LEAVING The literary interpretation of the nineties belonged to Peter Pišťanek. His trilogy Rivers of Babylon succeeded in parodying, or simplifying in a suitable way, the core of the decade. The work was a takeoff that was, within the frame of its genre, based on the milieu we inhabited. With his tone and story-telling skills, Pišťanek was able to loosen the tensions, fears and frustrations of those times. After the success of the trilogy's first volume, most exponents of the upcoming generation of writers had recourse to the strategy of avoiding anything that might concern the hardly understandable present. In fact, the young generation actually used their work to leave the country – if only on paper. Perhaps it was simply a manifestation of shock, or it was the only possible way to write under the pressures of the time. The newly-discovered postmodern discourse and the abolition of standard oppositions, the delight in creating text, the death of the author, deconstruction, desemantization, intertextuality, intratextuality, mystification and inauthenticity all proved to be convenient instruments for the upcoming generation. Václav Pankovčín, Vladimír Balla, Tomáš Horváth, Pavol Rankov, Marek Vadas, 100
Daniela Kapitáňová and many others are accurately labeled as the products of this tendency. The stories by Pavol Rankov or Tomáš Horváth could easily take place elsewhere or nowhere for that matter. The authors who asserted themselves in the nineties manifest a distance from real life facts, which would otherwise force them to define the movements within their society. The young generation wasn't motivated enough to face these challenges and lacked self-confidence in this respect. Its creative approach displayed shock and resistance. The reviewers, expecting the arrival of something that was coming rather slowly, were cold in their reaction. Essays titles such as Commentaries on the prosaic (de)generation or P(r)oses after 1989 are indicative of the atmosphere. Critics of poetry and prose refused to play the younger generation's games. In prose, the short story was dominant. Secondhand Bookshop, a collection of short stories by Tomáš Horváth, epitomized this tendency in its selfindulgent play with the works of the world literary canon. The direction taken by poetry was captured in the project Generator X, undertaken by a group of authors who debuted in the nineties with the publishing house Drewo a srd. This initiative was a generational rejection of authorship and the lyric subject, through work which was both collective and anonymous. In their respective collections, Peter Macsovsky, Peter Šulej, Michal Habaj, Nora Ružičková and Martin Solotruk attacked traditional interpretation, proceeding in a way that had previously been seen only once in Slovak literature in connection with the debut of the generation of lone runners of the sixties, authors who were almost immediately banned. In contrast with the prose writers, the poets of the nineties were able
to find their generational critic in Jaroslav Šrank who, by his research into the works of these authors, was able to reevaluate the outcomes of that time's criticism. Peter Macsovsky preferred to leave the country. With his new novel Shaking the Skeletons, his return attracted a great deal of attention and is symptomatic of the tendencies of the new millennium. RETURN OF LOST SONS AND DAUGHTERS? The return home was somewhat gradual, and it didn't take a direct course: Peter Bílý by way of Spain, Michal Hvorecký through Iceland, Germany and beyond, Svetlana Žuchová in Austria, through France and Slovenia in the short stories and the novel of Ivana Dobrakovová, and finally through Africa in Marek Vadas’s short stories. The prose of the new millennium has begun to explore the real world and certain risk takers have even dared to venture back to their home country. At present, novels overshadow short stories. Márius Kopcsay, Monika Kompaníková, Jaroslav Rumpli, Víťo Staviarsky, Veronika Šikulová, Jana Beňová (and, of course, Balla, Peter Macsovsky, Pavol Rankov, Marek Vadas, Ivana Dobrakovová, Svetlana Žuchová) are the most prominent figures in the younger generations of contemporary Slovak literature. Their stories are overtly situated in places such as Nové Zámky, Levice, Petržalka, Prešov, Košice, and even a workers colony in Bratislava in Monika Kompaníková's The Fifth Ship. With these new developments at hand, we can begin to read the literature of the nineties in new ways. Translated from Slovak by Marek Sečkař
The author is a Slovak poet, writer and critic. Organizer of the Anasoft Litera book prize VISEGRAD INSIGHT 1|2012