Poetry since 1945

#1 A qualitative change came after the death of Stalin and the collapse of the cult of personality. Until then Slovak literature had been mired in a crisis unlike any other in the 20th century. In these dark years poets were allowed to publish only works which accorded with strict cultural and political directives; some of them remained silent willingly, while the silence of others was enforced. Several cultural representatives or artists were imprisoned following artificial political processes (the most famous being the process involving the so-called ‘bourgeois nationalists’ where several leading artists including Ladislav Novomeský and Ivan Horváth were sentenced to imprisonment), while in the so-called ‘monster processes’ many members of the artistic intelligentsia (including Vladimír Clementis) were even sentenced to death and executed.
The first remarkable talents of the latter part of the 1950s were those of poets Milan Rúfus and Miroslav Válek. Both entered literature relatively late, intentionally avoiding the vulgar schematic years.
The first collection by Milan Rúfus, entitled Až dozrieme (‘When We Mature’, 1956) resumes the Symbolist line of Slovak poetry with sorrow as its basic tonality, the tragic feeling and return to private and intimate expression. Rúfus from the very beginning introduced himself as a poet of lasting human and artistic values that did not change in his subsequent output which amounted to over 20 books of verse in the years 1956-2008, including Zvony (‘The Bells’, 1968), Chlapec maľuje dúhu (‘A Boy Paints the Rainbow’, 1974), Prísny chlieb (‘Severe Bread’, 1987), Čítanie z údelu (‘Reading From Fate’, 1996) and Vernosť (‘Faithfulness’, 2007).
#2 A more dynamic change was brought to Slovak poetry by Miroslav Válek, who carried on the modernisng trends of the home and foreign avante garde. The centre of Válek´s poetry became the image of man as a creature with a private as well as a social life, a human being giving love as well as losing it. Even though the anthropocentric character is typical of art, the poetic vision of man by Válek has almost metaphysical validity. In this anthropology man is a unique creature, as well as part of a larger whole within the history of the world. His formal expression is unique, marked in early collections (Dotyky, ‘Touches’,1959 and Príťažlivosť, ‘Attractions’, 1961) by civil language, dynamic metaphor and irony, and in later collections (Nepokoj, ‘Unrest’, 1963 and mainly Milovanie v husej koži, ‘Making Love in Goose Flesh’, 1965) by disillusion, sarcasm and even cynicism. According to Válek, a poem has to originate from an idea and the poem carries the meaning as a whole. Válek introduced himself as a poet of a thinker’s calibre (‘an analyst and a synthetist in one person’, E Jenčíková) and a suggestive poetic image.
Together with Miroslav Válek and Milan Rúfus, other authors contributed in a positive way to the development of Slovak poetry. One of them was Viliam Turčány with his late debut Jarky v kraji (‘Ditches in the Country’, 1957), in which he brings back idylic poetry and enchantment with classical form.
The decisive moment at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s was the arrival of a strong poetic group so called Trnava Group, also known as the Concretists, made up of Ján Stacho, Ján Ondruš, Jozef Mihalkovič and Ľubomír Feldek. Their position in Slovak poetry was so strong at the beginning of 1960s that the subsequent generation of poets entering literature a few years later felt the necessity to annul the poetry of the Concretists, to get rid of its impact. The poetry of the Concretists was based on sensual concreteness and ‘concrete memory’ (it was from this that the name of the group was derived), which got into poetry through sound and picture motives, through evocation of childhood and personal experience. Metaphor was lifted up (‘metaphore will save the world’, Ľ Feldek), metaphor was able to enchant through its imaginative character and meaningful interpretation. The inclination to sensual phenomena marked efforts to avoid the political requirements of the official cultural doctrine.
Despite a joint appearance (in 1958), this poetic group comprised strong individuals who in the end parted company in their artistic programme. Ján Ondruš was the first to acquire a strong personal profile in the group, he aroused interest through his poems published in the latter part of the 1950s. However, a publishing house refused to release his debut work and his first book was only published six years later, this was the collectionŠialený mesiac (‘Crazy Moon’, 1965), considered one of the most remarkable books of the decade (Milan Hamada). In many-sided parallels Ondruš accentuated human communication, isolation and necessity of the human touch (literally). Images of human vulnerability, motives of pain and impaired integrity were interpreted in an unchangeable poetic manuscript based on ‘dislocation’ of worlds (inventive word collocations based on new syntactic links) and on subject-vs-object exchange, where the author was the ‘fictitious co-subject’ to himself (F Matejov). His favourite topics were developed in longer poetic works as well, eg Posunok s kvetom(‘Gesture With a Flower’, 1968), V stave žlče (‘In a State of Gall’, 1968) či Kľak (‘Genuflection’, 1970).
Another important poetic figure who attracted attention at the beginning of the 1960s was poet and concretist Ján Stacho. He brought suggestive metaphor to poetry, derived from a unique human experience rich in sensual impulse or stimulus (the field of erotics and bodiness), which he evoked through lively images and associations understandable in suprasensual (non-verbal) reception. Gradually in his poetry, vertical, almost baroque relationships between man and the world are deepened, man aware not only of his intense experience on the Earth, but also of the duality of deeds in another, spiritual dimension. Extatic poems about corporeal intoxication (the collection Svadobná cesta, ‘Honeymoon’, 1961) changed to poems about unfulfilled man and the unfullfillness of man (Dvojramenné čisté telo, ‘Two Arms Of A Clean Body’, 1964) and a search for harmony which however is not to be found. Neither does the ‘word’, which used to be a reliable guide in the first books, bring the much sought-after solution to tiredness, depression and the threat of death (the collectionsZážehy, ‘Ignition’, 1967 and Apokryfy, ‘Apocryphs’, 1969). Jozef Mihalkovič was the third concretist poet whose poetry derived from the epic movement of the story, the parable of a human life, in which he often links the present time with the past (topics of childhood and memory). Intensely deep experience overtakes the words and can only be described by a fitting metaphor rich in associations (Ľútosť, ‘Pity’, 1962 and Zimoviská, ‘Winter Dwellings’, 1965). The antitheasis to Mihalkovič and his restrained statement is the poetry of Ľubomír Feldek; even though both share some topics (the family, the role of the male). Feldek resumes the avante gardeplayfulness which is a constant part of his poetics. Children´s perception without limits is regarded by him as the fundamental mode of viewing. Writing books for children becomes for Feldek as important as writing books for adults.