Suchergebnisse

This article focuses on the image of the Russian professors in The Eccentric University (2008), a novel by Stanislav Rakús. Based on previous research, the author presents a short survey of Russian images in Slovak Literature in the late nineteenth — early twentieth-first centuries, whose peculiarities are rooted in the history of interaction between the two Slavic nations. Thus, the early twentieth century idealistic image of the Russian was built on the basis of Russian literature. The first images of Russians based on personal experience were created by Czechoslovak legionnaires as a result of interaction with Russians between 1917 and 1920, while after World War II, they were presented through a dichotomy "brother — suppressor", to be changed into more dynamic ones by the early twenty-first century. The Eccentric University, which the author approaches from the perspective of the academic novel and part of Rakъs's academic trilogy, enlarges the list of literary images of the Russians in Slovak literature. The author analyses images of Maria Petrovna Golovčikova, a female professor of Russian nineteenth-century literature, and Alexandr Kirillovič Ћuprej, a professor of Russian literature, both immigrant scholars at a Slovak university in the 1950s. The author maintains that through these images, Rakъs addresses not only Slovak Russophilic stereotypes historically embedded in nineteenth-century literary images of Russians, but also gender and immigrant stereotypes that circulate in contemporary Slovak culture. The author concludes that an ironic portrayal of Russian professors is directed at the cultural memory activation, which together with other features typical for both campus and academic novel adds to the new (Rakús's) invariant of the "university novel".

This article analyses the cultural images of the Vilnius ghetto and the methods of its categorisation in Polish-language texts of the interwar period in tourist guides, feuilletons, and poetry. In the texts of the Vilnius authors, Julisz Kłos, professor of Vilnius University, poets Witold Hulewicz and Konstanty Gałczyński, the ghetto is defined in terms of modernity as a medieval and chaotic urban space that requires modernisation; in terms of pictorialism as a picturesque part of the city; in terms of heterogeneity as an alien space creating an urban heterotopia, and as a space of everyday life, specific for the whole of Vilnius. The article emphasises the fact that the image of Vilnius as an urban heterotopia was shaped by foreigners, including authors of German guides of the World War I years and subsequently by foreign guests visiting Vilnius in the interwar period. In their texts, the ghetto appears as an intriguing part of the city space. Noticed by a foreigner who played the role of the "other", the specificity and originality of the ghetto influenced the perceptions of the city by some representatives of the Polish intelligentsia. The textual image of the Vilnius ghetto reveals the beliefs, worldviews, images, ideology, and to some extent the aesthetic inclinations of the authors for whom the ghetto was an alien city. A different attitude was represented by Jerzy Wyszomirski, a writer and journalist who comprehended the space of the ghetto, its languages, Yiddish and Hebrew, and treated the Jewish world with kindness as neighbourly and familiar, thus eliminating the structures of otherness that allowed the ghetto to be incorporated into the general idea of the city.