Authors
Dobrota Pucherova1; 1 Inst. of World Lit., Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia Discussion
René mláďenca príhodi a skúsenosti (“The adventures and experiences of the young man René”, 1783) by Jozef Ignác Bajza is the first Slovak novel that preceded both its Hungarian and Czech counterparts in the Hapsburg monarchy even as the Slovak nation, or standardized Slovak language, did not yet exist. It shows that Bajza, who studied in Vienna and besides Slovak and Hungarian read Latin, German and French, was familiar with the genres and discourses of his time. René can be read as an Enlightenment novel of education, a heroic romance, a satirical novel, and an orientalist fantasy, with picaresque, comic and didactic elements. While being an original story, it owes much of its imagination, ideological assumptions and narrative devices to Bajza’s immediate predecessors such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Fénelon or Darrell. As a Slovak nationalist, Bajza wrote the novel to promote the idea of the Slovak people as a modern European nation rooted in Christian values and in step with Enlightenment modernity. As such, it is simultaneously cosmopolitan and local, and can be read as both “peripheral” and “classic”. Based on my experience of preparing René in English translation to make it available for readership outside Slovakia for the first time, and drawing on David Damrosch’s idea of world literature as that which translates well, I will ask how Bajza’s novel fits into the European canon and can become a world classic through translation, circulation and ways of reading. 
