The East or the West? Actualization of the Slavic and Avant- garde Traditions in Slovak Literature, 1945– 49

The first ideas about how literature and literary life in Slovakia should look after the end of World War II were formulated by their protagonists as early as 1945. In the short period between 1945 and 1948, a part of modern domestic policy and of the ideological and literary traditions was actualized in programme- guided discussions and debates, but also in legally binding documents. The first line of this actualization movement reached back to the depth of the nineteenth century – to the Romantic concept of mighty Slavdom and pan- Slavic reciprocity. This line had a politically and ideologically declarative form, which was set in the Košice Government Programme of May 1945, right at the beginning of this historic period. On the one hand, it was a symbolic reaction to the victory of the Soviet Union in the war, and the main aspiration in this respect was to partake in this victory. On the symbolic level, which is the other aspect of this movement, we can clearly perceive the emphasis on the continuity between the present and the past in the form of ‘capturing the distant thread’, which results in a version of a ‘dream fulfilled’: ‘Today, Slavdom is not just a collection of ideas from books, poetic visions, literary reverie, but it is a great power – one of the greatest powers of the world […] The dream about strong awareness from a century ago has turned into reality today’. The reminder of the old times of ‘dreaming’ took the form of verbal declarations as well as specific commemorative acts linked primarily to the two dimensions of the national revival movement in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first dimension was personalized and was constituted by efforts to ‘objectify’ the life and works of L'udovít Štúr (1815–1856), the key representative of the Romantic phase of national revival and the codifier of the standard Slovak language. By objectivization the protagonists of these efforts primarily understood the ‘scientific’ (as of those times – Marxist) interpretation of Štúr's view of communism and the removal of Štúr from the nationalist framework (for example, the codification of the standard Slovak language during the existence of the wartime fascist Slovak state was interpreted as an anti- Czech emancipatory gesture).