Recent Prose of Hana Ponická and Ol’ga Feldeková: Dissident Autobiography and Aesopian Fiction

Abstract

Events in Czechoslovakia since 17 November 1989 have broken down ideological rules that formerly condemned or distanced literature lying outside the narrow category of socialist realism. As a result new comparative studies can provide a more complete picture of Slovak literature than we have had in the past. Literature is no longer divided into the four streams of officially praised works, of ‘Aesopian’ works that were published but treated with suspicion, of dissident samizdat and tamizdat works, and finally of exile or ethnic literature that was ignored by home-based critics. Literary historians will modify the current Marxist periodisation of literary epochs and presumably reintroduce categories such as naturalism that were almost subsumed under the political heading of critical realism. One may also expect that genuine gains in developing literary history, for which Marxist analysis was in certain ways more useful for the Slovaks than the positivist historical methods used in pre-war Czechoslovakia, will not be thrown out with the bathwater.¹