Authors

Rajendra Chitnis¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

Since the late 1980s, Slovak literature, like other late Communist/post-Communist counterparts, has witnessed the inexorable rise to prominence of female writers whose work has more or less disruptively redressed the canonical dominance of male writers. Slovak literature has been striking for the extent to which this rise has been accompanied and informed by engagement with Western feminist discourses, wherein Slovak writers have come to see themselves more as participants in dialogue than followers of trends. The novelist, playwright, translator and commentator, Jana Juráňová (b.1957), has been a driving force of this development for decades, as a writer and translator and as co-founder of the explicitly feminist publisher and educational organisation, ASPEKT. Through its wide-ranging activities, interactions especially with like minds in neighbouring countries, and publications of both imaginative literature and non-fiction, ASPEKT has sought to awaken Slovak and Central European societies to feminist analyses of the status and treatment of women and their rights and concerns within them. In this paper, I shall compare Juráňová‘s approach in three fictional texts that centre on – or rather de-centre – famous male Slovak writers. In the roman-à-clef, Utrpenie starého kocúra (The sufferings of an old tom-cat, 2000), Juráňová questions Pavel Vilikovský’s right to imagine in a short story a disabled woman’s experience of rape. In the novel Žila som s Hviezdoslavom (2008, translated into English by Julia and Peter Sherwood as Ilona: My Life with the Bard), she reminisces from the perspective of the widow of the canonical Slovak poet and playwright, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav. Finally, in the play Tichý bič (The quiet whip, 2015), she highlights the Fascist sympathies of the inter-war novelist, Milo Urban. While Juráňová is often playful and subversive, in keeping with 1970s French notions of how women writers disrupt male literary language, her work also forcefully confronts men who more or less unconsciously abuse their status, and the society that praises them while overlooking their failings.