Teraz je túto krajinu vidno najlepšie. Začína sa jar. Dni sú teraz dlhé a svetlé. Stromy ešte nemajú lístie, a tak výhľad nič nezakrýva. Krajina je nahá. Začiatkom jari je vidieť, že je hrdinská a dramatická. Mení sa, sťahuje zo seba kožu. Chvíľami je škaredá ako odhalená kostra. Všetky tie reklamy popri cestách, bilbordy, veľké farebné tabule, vychvaľujúce lacný tovar, monštruózne fotografie mäsa: pliecko 9,90, sedliacka klobása 16,90, kuracie filé… Lišaje ostrých farieb pokrývajú steny, zakrývajú stromy, nebo, krajinu. Všetky tie lákadlá, bez ohľadu na to, či ide o mäso, oblečenie, telefóny alebo vyučovanie jazykov – pôsobia rovnako pornograficky, sú […]

Photo: Peter Župník Libya. In Poland in the 1970s and 1980s the word sounded like an incantation. It sounded like Open Sesame. Qaddafi needed engineers, technicians and workers to modernize his country. Communist Poland started a long-term love affair with him, sending him workers. The Colonel’s revolutionary and anti-Western rhetoric made him appear like something of a political ally. However, for ordinary people it was the economy that counted. While the average salary in Poland at the time was the equivalent of 20 US dollars, the colonel paid (after a fee extorted by the communist administration) at least fifteen times […]

The British writer William Boyd has recently praised Daniela Kapitáňová’’s novel Samko Tále’’s Cemetery Book in the Guardian.  I was delighted and rather proud to learn that this was the book he chose out of the plethora of publications on the British market. Translations of our fiction are quite rare, and that is why the work done by the translator, Julia Sherwood, the daughter of Agneša and Ján Kalina, famous émigrés and natives of Prešov [in eastern Slovakia], deserves to be spotlighted. What made my joy even greater was the fact that I have recently enjoyed reading Boyd’s thriller Restless. […]

My dear friend Selma Steinerová (27. 11. 1925 – 28. 8. 2010), who passed away last Saturday, will be fondly remembered by scores of locals as well as those who visited Bratislava since the 1990s. They will remember her smiling, advising and sometimes admonishing her visitors (never mere customers) in the revived Antikvariát Steiner in Ventúrska Street, the last station in her long and thorny journey through life. This sunny period was preceded by years of struggle and suffering.  Yet in 1925 it seemed that she was born under a lucky star, into an affluent, harmonious, educated and genuinely religious […]

Keď sa moja dávna a verná priateľka Selma Steinerová (1925 – 28. 8. 2010) minulú sobotu ráno už nezobudila, zanechala za sebou krásnu spomienku: množstvo Bratislavčanov aj ľudia, ktorí sa tu od 90. rokov niekedy ocitli, ju v duchu videli znova pred sebou. Spomínali na ňu, ako sa usmieva, radí, občas aj napomína svojich návštevníkov (teda zákazníkov) v obnovenom “steinerovskom” antikvariáte na Ventúrskej ulici. Doviedla ju sem dlhá a ozaj tŕnistá cesta, tento slnečný záver života si vybojovala a vopred odtrpela. Vojnu prežila ako dieťa Pritom sa v roku 1925 zdalo, že sa narodila pod šťastnou hviezdou, do zámožnej, harmonicky […]

The communist party officials regarded all their subjects as an undifferentiated gray mass: the people, a collective noun, like the herd. The officials liked to flaunt their Soviet people, their Czechoslovak people. Everything they did was on behalf of the people and for their benefit, and all their decisions were ostensibly based on the will of the people.  Weighing and measuring the will of the people was, of course, impossible, but that’’s what we had the officials for, so that they could predict it in retrospect and interpret it. The mantra of our present-day politicians and their election slogans is […]

As someone born in 1976 I belong to the generation of  Gustáv Husák’’s [Communist Party Chief and later President of Czechoslovakia] children, of whom around  a million were born within a single decade.  It was hard to imagine a  greater contrast than that between these baby boomers and the aging leadership. Vasiľ Biľak [one of the Communist hardliners who had invited in the Russian tanks in 1968] was born in 1917, President Husák in 1913.  The Soviet Politburo was also extremely elderly and were the butt of jokes about which politician would be the first to die. My long-term platonic love affair […]

Narodil som sa roku 1976 a patrím do generácie detí Gustáva Husáka, ktorých sa počas jedného desaťročia narodilo takmer milión. Oproti baby boomu ani nemohol byť väčší kontrast ako prestarnuté vedenie štátu. Vasiľ Biľak bol ročník 1917, prezident Husák dokonca 1913. Aj sovietske politbyro bolo mimoriadne prestarnuté a mnohé vtipy sa točili okolo toho, ktorý politik skôr zomrie. Môj dlhoročný platonický vzťah s Rakúskom, predovšetkým s Viedňou, sa zařal v detstve. Každý piatok si mnohé bratislavské rodiny kupovali rakúske noviny Volkstimme. V centrálnom orgáne Komunistickej strany Rakúska vychádzal program rakúskej televízie, ktorý sa nikde inde v Československu nedal zistiť. Tento Hlas ľudu, v krajine […]

Official languages are important political tools. Slovak is no exception. In this sense it is admirable that the current Slovak government pays so much attention to the Slovak language. Even though it’’s not the first time that the highest power in the land is addressing the Slovaks’’ mother tongue.  The examination made regarding the high order of the 4th day of this month about the former Professor at the Protestant Lyceum in Pressburg, Ľ’udevít Štúr, who submitted a request for permission to publish in the Empire a Slovak language magazine under the title Slovak National News has produced the following […]

What does Slovakia mean to Slovaks? It means a country, a land, a homeland, a nation, a society they identify with – some intensely, others less so – based on ties, particularly some newer ones that bind them to their formative period or, as the case may be, the period that preceded their birth and is thus part of the world they can perceive as their current awareness and that is not beyond their powers of navigation. It means a period of 75 years or a century at most, a historical arc aligned with their identity which has been, to put it simply, shaped by the memory […]