| Summary: | The article deals with the argument over Milovanie v husej koži /Lovemaking With Goose Pimples On/ by Miroslav Válek. The collection of poems published in 1965 became in 1966 the subject of the argument between M. Hamada and S. Šmatlák. M. Červenka of the Czech side got involved in it as well. The polemic was seen as one of the key literary events of the decade right in the 1960s. The presented text reconstructs it as a chiasmus of poetry and criticism, structuralism-inspired analysis and interpretation of a poetic text and its radicalizing, existentially appealing finalization of the thinking process. The protagonist of the polemic M. Hamada deliberately situated it on the boundary between literary and moral-critical social debates. What M. Hamada vehemently identified in Válek´s „fourth book of restlessness“ was Nihilism and related amorphous, fragmentary, and cliché lyric messages. The other participant of the argument S. Šmatlák defended M. Válek in the name of everlasting Humanism including the negative moments of the human and the world using – in his opinion – Válek´s provably structured poetry. The argument is contextualized in the article as an argument over moderating the form of the poetry in the 1960s (on the one hand analytical unmasking of the human situation and on the other hand his cathartic poetic saviour), the nature of criticism (work at the service of the text as opposed to the efforts to autonomously reflect on literature and the state of the world), as the confrontation between the traditional and ideological reflections of Humanism and the related contemporary issues (the philosophy of existence, M. Heidegger, Structuralism of the 1960s, literature itself ranging from S. Beckett to J.-P. Sartre). The argument anticipated the schism of Slovak literature in the 1970s and 1980s, namely Šmatlák´s ideological viewpoints in the 1970s and 1980s and Hamada´s moralizing gestures as of the 1990s. The article records the impact of the argument on the interpretations of poetic texts in Slovak writing about poetry, its methodical dimensions as well as the still open issues of reading Válek´s poetry itself. Finally, it takes notice of potential connections with F. Halas´s poetry updated from the mid-1950s (necro-motifs, the motif of fall and questioning of poetry as such).
|
|---|