Man in the Town (Dušan Kraus´s Debut Book Lives Fleeing)

The paper is based on the current conception of reception of the debut novel written by Dušan Kraus (1937 – 2001) Životy unikajúce/Lives Fleeing (1979). There are a genological and typological perspective and a literary historical perspective adopted in it, the paper offers an outline reconstruction...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Vladimír Barborík
Format: Article
Language:ces
Published: Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Slovak Literature 2020-11-01
Series:Slovenska Literatura
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.sav.sk/journals/uploads/11042129slov_lit_05-20-04.pdf
Description
Summary:The paper is based on the current conception of reception of the debut novel written by Dušan Kraus (1937 – 2001) Životy unikajúce/Lives Fleeing (1979). There are a genological and typological perspective and a literary historical perspective adopted in it, the paper offers an outline reconstruction of the literary career of a lesser-known writer. The subject of the analysis is the basic semantic layers of the work (language, narration, composition) and its genological and typological foundations. Within the context of prose written at that time, the novel is a specific piece of writing placed outside the established development lines. It is incompatible with what was introduced by the „novel situation“ at the turn of the 1980s, it is a work of production prose, while it is not influenced by ideological requirements, it is a contemporary piece of prose which was published at the time when Slovak literature was being dominated by past-bound works. Životy unikajúce/Lives Fleeing as a production or, alternatively, „work“ novel is an unusual variant of the subgenre in Slovak literature. In terms of evolution, it is situated somewhere halfway from the ideologically biased depiction of the work environment in the 1950s towards subversive recoding of the subject matter in the second half of the 1980s (in the works of the writers such as Peter Pišťanek and Dušan Taragel).
ISSN:0037-6973