The magyarisation, which intensified after the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, drained much of the Slovak nationalists' strength. The privileged classes (gentry) very rarely professed Slovak origin. In Hungarian society it was the opposite: the nobility entered the revolution and after the Ausgleich essentially determined Hungarian national policy. Ľudovít Štúr counted on the bourgeoisie, but mainly the peasantry, the countryside, which steadfastly resisted magyarisation. The majority of towns were, however, originally German and were later also magyarised. Only small towns remained Slovak, but even there Hungarians filled the authorities and the whole administrative system. The Bernolákites's cultural centre was Trnava, the old university town. The Štúrites focused their activity on Bratislava, where higher religious education was concentrated. In the 60s, Turčiansky Sv. Martin became a cultural (and to a significant extent also political) centre; it was a town with a few thousand inhabitants, the headquarters of Matica slovenská, a lycée, the National Museum, the association of Slovak women Živena, and other cultural institutions. Národnie noviny appeared in Martin in 1870, as did the political body Slovenská národná strana (Slovak national party; it was created in 1871 and took the Memorandum of the Slovak Nation as its manifesto) and Slovenské pohľady (1881), a literary monthly with a wide cultural net which is still published today. There were only a few towns besides Martin (Liptovský Sv. Mikuláš, Dolný Kubín, Prešov, Myjava, etc.) where cultural life was developed and the Slovak national idea could also depend on the bourgeoisie. The countryside was the national movement's only reservoir. But difficult economic conditions in Hungary forced many Slovaks, especially from the countryside, to emigrate overseas, mainly to the USA. The emigration from Slovakia lasted for decades and did not even stop after 1918, when the Czechoslovak Republic was established. This mass emigration weakened the Slovak ethnic group at home. On the other hand, American Slovaks (together with Czech emigrants) played an important role in the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic because they were the first to support T. G. Masaryk's idea of creating an independent state for Czechs and Slovaks.
           The cultural and literary activity in Martin was connected with a wide circle of nationally aware workers. The original clergymen had been joined by lawyers, bank clerks, doctors, editors and the like. Women also involved themselves in public cultural work. Živena did not just concern itself with education for women, but also supported women's ambitions in literature and the arts. After Matica slovenská was abolished (1875), this association took over many of its roles and functions. Slovenské pohľady, edited alternately by Svetozár Hurban Vajanský and Jozef Škultéty, was of great importance to the development of Slovak literature, and it developed promisingly

Svetozár Hurban Vajanský

despite the bad, often even desperate political conditions. Svetozár Hurban Vajanský (1847 - 1916), son of Jozef Miloslav Hurban, was a central figure of both Slovak literary (and wider cultural) life and Slovak politics for more than three decades. A poet, prose writer, literary critic, aesthetic, and excellent publicist (he was imprisoned three times for his sharp pen in defence of national interests), he defined the cultural and literary line and even influenced tastes for many years. He was a generally respected authority. In numerous papers, articles and studies, he referred with great familiarity and knowledge to both Slovak and world literature and art. It was mostly from him that Slovak readers gained information and knowledge about everything happening in Slovak and European literature, particularly Russian. He was an adherent of realism (he often recalls I. S. Turgenev, who was a paragon for him as a prose writer), but he was nationally motivated and therefore limited in our conditions. He accepted the great Russian realists because they did not evade current societal or social problems and attempted to solve them. On the other hand, he harshly condemned E. Zola and the whole of French naturalism as an expression of total degeneration. He regarded Zola's novels as pornography unsuitable for the Slovak reader. Despite Vajanský's bias in literary affairs, the fact alone that he wrote often and in detail about new trends in European literature in the Slovak press helped him to maintain contact with the world and forced him to reassess his own narrowly utilitarian ideas about works of literature.
           It can be said that developed world realist art had a positive influence on Slovak literature. It prevented it from falling into convenient idealism (us on one side, foreigners or the estranged on the other) and pursuing artistic goals above all.
           It is a fact that the burden of national enslavement still lay heavily on authors' shoulders and could not easily be shaken off. Some young poets tried when they published the almanac Napred (Onwards) in 1871, in which Koloman Banšell preferred love for a young girl to the salvation of his soul in the poem Len ma ľúb! (Just Love Me!). Representatives of the generation of "fathers" (J. M. Hurban and others) harshly condemned this subjectivity and redirected the young writers towards universal issues. And so the national theme continued to dominate Slovak literature in the era of realism, but adapted in a different way and no longer superficially transparent. It was also transposed in the work of S. H. Vajanský in this form.
           Vajanský originally studied law, but was not very successful as a lawyer and he also failed in his attempts to leave for Russia or Bulgaria as a teacher. He participated in the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a soldier in 1878. He shared his impressions and experiences with Slovak readers in Národnie noviny. He gained repute and in the same year became its editor (and later editor in chief) and mainly long-term contributor. He used his forced stay in Bosnia and Herzegovina as the theme for his first poetry anthology Tatry a more (The Tatras and the Sea, 1880), which signified a split in the development of Slovak poetry and is regarded, figuratively speaking, as a "manifesto" of Slovak literary realism. Similarly to Ján Kollár in his Slávy dcera, Vajanský, linked his intensive subjective experience abroad with topical idealistic issues concerning the domestic situation. The anthology was remarkably successful and carried the message that it is necessary to fight for freedom on a highly poetic level. In it, Vajanský showed himself to be a cultivated writer using modern verse systems. Another two of Vajanský's anthologies, Spod jarma (From Under the Yoke, 1884) a Verše (Verse, 1890), have a similar nature (but with less subjective experience).
           Vajanský's focus changed to the sphere of prose quite early on. After a series of stories in which he formulates his relationship to the people and a whole set of novellas with socially relevant themes, he went on to the write novels, which were regarded as the highest type of prose everywhere in the period of realism. After J. I. Bajza's attempts (René mládenca príhody a skúsenosti) and K. Banšell's unfinished novel (Valgatha), Vajanský is only the third Slovak novelist. He discovered that he had the abilities and creative potency to realise this aim. The Štúrites' aesthetic opinion that folklore is the ideal national art lasted until the 1870s. Vajanský's work contradicted this opinion perfectly. His ideal was the novels of European realism (particularly the work of Russian authors) and his ambition was to equal them, to create a modern Slovak novel. Vajanský's resolve radically altered both the content and shape of works of prose. He brought a wide range of characters into his novels, from the gentry through bourgeoisie to peasants. He placed particular emphasis on characters belonging to the intelligentsia, because he could use them to demonstrate more complicated attributes and psychological reactions or complicated thought processes. He was a lasting favourite among artistic and bohemian types, for whom he shone through his knowledge of his art and art in general.
           Vajanský's concept that a work of literature is a complicated and well-balanced system, where individual structural components, composition, subject, story, characters, or plot play a large role, went hand in hand with his efforts. Emphasis on all this became a necessary condition for the author in the conception of his novels. With this formal "equipment", he wrote and published his first novella Letiace tiene (Flying Shadows, 1883) and the novel Suchá ratolesť (Dry Branch, 1884) about the deterioration of the gentry's situation, where he placed the nationally aware squire Rudopolský in the centre of the story. In the novel Koreň a výhonky (Roots and Shoots, 1895 - 96), he concentrated on depicting a patriarchal peasant family. He saw the peasants as roots of the national entity and the intelligentsia (generation of children) as individual shoots. The generation novel Kotlín (Hollows, 1901), a novel of "fathers and children", has the traits of a pamphlet. In it the author comes to terms with the philosophy of the young generation of hlasists (named after the revue Hlas, 1898 - 1904), with which he had many ideological disputes because it arrived at a different concept of national life and openly criticised the so-called Martin wing (Vajanský, Škultéty and others).
           Vajanský wanted to provide the Slovak reader with a powerful reading experience. In each novel he developed a richly configured story while addressing relevant national-social issues. He realised all this with a fine style and cultivated language. There was not enough authentic material for his novels in Slovak life, which was weakly developed and fairly undifferentiated, and so he had to rely on fantasy and invent a richer and more complex world than the one around him. This approach introduced elements of romanticism into his prose. The stress he placed on the national existence threatened by magyarisation in every work added elements of ideological schematism.

Pavol Ország Hviezdoslav

           Vajanský's contemporary, the poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (1849 - 1921), is one of the greatest figures of Slovak literature per se. The genius of the Slovak nation scaled new heights in his poetry. Hviezdoslav's extensive work is an independent sovereign universe which mirrors the world of the individual, family, nature, and sufferings of the national fate with all its changes of fortune and universal problems. As a world of forms, Hviezdoslav's poetry is a colourful and complex organism, in which the most diverse poetic formations, systems and genres are represented. P. O. Hviezdoslav lived in his native Orava almost all his life (he was born in Vyšný Kubín, worked as a lawyer in Námestovo and lived out his life in Dolný Kubín), but he embraced all Slovak poetry (the closest to him was Andrej Sládkovič; he dedicated his first collection of poems, Básnické prviesenky Jozefa Zbranského - First Flowers of Poetry of Jozef Zbranský, to him), but he also studied in depth the greatest figures of European poetry from Dante and Shakespeare, through Goethe, Schiller and Hugo, to Pushkin and Lermontov; he also translated them all. He was also close to Hungarian poetry (E. Ady, I. Madách, J. Arany, S. Petőfi) and became a writing member of the Hungarian Kisfaludy society for his translations into Slovak.
           Hviezdoslav's poetry and translations from world poetry were a taxing test of literary Slovak. Hviezdoslav's work, including his translations, proved that the relatively young language, developing in a national society with a small intelligentsia and few social classes, was capable of adequately interpreting complicated thought processes and nuances of emotion. In doing this, the author had to help himself using dialectal elements (oravisms) and utilise expressions from neighbouring Slavic languages.
           When not translating, Hviezdoslav applied himself to lyrical poetry, epics and dramas. Whole cycles, into which he collected work in individual periods, are typical of his lyrical poetry (Letorosty - Sprigs) I., II., III., Sonety, Žalmy a hymny - Sonnets, Psalms and Hymns), Prechádzky jarom - Strolls through Spring, Prechádzky letom - Strolls through Summer, Dozvuky - Echoes). He alternates motifs of family life (poems dedicated to his mother) with nature (with its cycles), which the poet generally understands as a metaphor of life, and lamentations over the nation's fate invoked through biblical motifs, etc. The poet addresses the dilemma between "pure" art and service to the nation and decides on service. But he repeatedly complains about the "non-resonance" of his poetry, about the fact that his poetic initiative somehow did not reach the audience and fell into the abyss and this reinforced his feeling of solitude. He constantly returns to every theme, but to national pain and injustice most of all. He does not hesitate to criticise his own ranks harshly if practice digresses from ideals and people show themselves to be too materialistic and unworthy. When discontent and anger well up in him, he can blaze up in a holy fire of moral outrage like an old testament prophet (the poem Slovenský Prometej - Slovak Prometeus) in the interest of putting things right, in the interest of the national future. Everything in Hviezdoslav's poetry is derived from his morally exacting, essentially religious relationship towards the world. In his case it does not concern convention, but the expression of deep and sincere religious belief and emotion, which became an intrinsic part of the poet's creation. He also criticised the first world war through the prism of the moral ideal (Krvavé sonety - Bloody Sonnets, 1919), where he expressed pain and disappointment at the properties of mankind, but also faith that this bloodbath would bring a fairer world, equality between nations and freedom for the individual.
           Hviezdoslav's poetic epic is carried on a wave of optimism and the positive side of life. The poet worked up from smaller epics to lengthy poems on the level of an epos, in which he effectively depicted the world as he saw it while introducing his own concept of social and national existence. In the lyrical epic poem Hájnikova žena (The Gamekeeper's Wife, 1884 - 86), a dramatic story of sincere love and an attempt at sexual abuse which ends in murder and the court unfolds against the backdrop of the beautiful Orava countryside. A member of the "ruling" class wants to take the gamekeeper's young wife and she murders him. It is therefore also a conflict of two worlds, one rotten and the other healthy, the world of the "people", which has a future. The problem of the gentry did not only worry Vajanský, Hviezdoslav also devotes space to it in two lengthy epics: Ežo Vlkolínsky (1890) and Gábor Vlkolínsky (1901). Unlike Vajanský, who looks at the gentry from outside and views it from the point of view of national ideology, Hviezdoslav - from that background himself - sees the issue of the privileged class from inside. As a vital democrat who overcame his original social rank, he introduced here the ideal of social equality; in the first epic in a quite conventional story (a young squire takes a peasant girl as his wife and his conservative mother therefore comes to hate him; the grandchild resolves the conflict and reconciles the mother with her son), in the second epic through a colourful picture of life in the countryside and conflicts between the gentry and peasantry. The epic (it could almost be called a novel in verse) is a detailed and picturesque chronicle of the rural world with the colour of customs and celebration of work.
           Hviezdoslav's series of poems on biblical motifs (Agar, 1883; Ráchel, 1891; Kain - Cain, 1893; Vianoce (Christmas), 1898; Sen Šalamúnov (Solomon´s Dream), 1901), which displays Hviezdoslav's poetic virtuosity, also has an epic plan. Hviezdoslav's Shakespearean style verse drama Herodes a Herodias (Herod and Herodias, 1909) also has a biblical theme. The story about Salome and John the Baptist is a clear condemnation of depraved power. It was an allegory, pointing out the status of Slovakia within Hungary.

Martin Kukučín

           Slovak literary realism has an important representative in the prose writer Martin Kukučín (1960 - 1928). Martin Kukučín (real name Matej Bencúr) did not share Vajanský's ambition to create modern Slovak literature on the level of European literature, depict complicated characters, and write in a high style. Kukučín (a doctor) relied on his own experience from the outset and used it exclusively. As he came from a village (Jasenová na Orave), plainly the majority of his stories had a rural theme. Rustic stories form a dominant genre in Kukučín's work from the first decade following his entry into literature. They contain small stories from the lives of peasants or village craftsmen, mainly of a humorous nature. Kukučín had an emotional relationship towards the rural world, but at the same time saw it as a plus within the idea of national revival and protection against magyarisation. It is true that in this sense he does not invest any a priori construction into his subjects, he contents himself with reproducing the facts of life within his empiricism and only takes care over what makes the stories and characters sound lively and real. Kukučín does not worry why the Slovak gentry did not want or manage to integrate into the national whole, he did not even settle this issue when he used them as a subject (Keď báčik z Chochoľova umrie... - When the Uncle from Chochoľov Dies..., 1890). He saw the privileged social class in a state of decay, as a phenomenon which was dying out, and it was pointless to include them. He made do with the rural theme, from which he took more and more stimuli and motifs. If any development can be recognised at this stage of Kukučín's prose, it must be seen mainly in the deepening of his view of man and more thorough psychological depiction of his characters. The story Neprebudený (Unawakened, 1886) is a masterful psychological study of a mentally handicapped youth. In much of his prose (Koniec a začiatok - End and Beginning, Dies irae...) he also resolved to solve wider social issues through conflict between family or emotional and property interests, but his popularity mainly lay in his humour. Almost all of his short stories are actually humoresques, based on comic situations or humorously seen rural characters. Kukučín's humour is affectionate, it never grows into irony or satire. The author likes his characters and draws them with love, while being well aware of their weaknesses and failings. A basic trait of Kukučín's work is therefore trust in the lower classes which are a healthy part of national life and a guarantee for the future.
           Fate led Martin Kukučín far from Slovakia. In 1894, he went to be a doctor on the island of Brač (now in Croatia), from where he set out for South America in 1907 with a group of Croatian emigrants and set himself up as a doctor in Punta Arenas (Chile). He took the theme for his novel Dom v stráni (House on a Hillside, 1903 - 4) from his time on Brač. It is a wide ranging story about relationships between the peasants and gentry on the island, with excellent characters and a detailed description of the environment. The traditional theme based on social conflict finds a masterful artist in Kukučín. He included his experience of life in South America in his extensive novel Mať volá (The Homeland Calls, 1926 - 27). The plot of the novel is quite thin, but its reflexive side is rich; the author does not only address the causes of emigration, but also better social arrangements of the world (e.g. he deals in detail with the role of money), so that no-one would have to leave their homeland. However, the whole novel is full of nostalgia for home. After returning home (1923), Kukučín did not stay in Slovakia for long: he moved between Slovakia and Croatia. The situation in Slovakia was completely different to when he left and he could not live there any more. He saw problems, however, particularly in the co-existence of Czechs and Slovaks, and reacted to it directly through a historical story (the novel Lukáš Blahosej Krasoň, published posthumously in 1929) set in the mid 19th century. He also returned to the period of the national revival with another novel published posthumously, Bohumil Valizlosť Zábor (1929). Kukučín's work after his return no longer influenced literary development, which was going down completely different tracks through the work of the younger generation.

Timrava

           Božena Slančíková, who wrote under the nom de plume Timrava (1867 - 1951) is from the second wave of literary realism and unquestionably forms its high point. Like Kukučín, the gentry said nothing to her, but neither did she have any illusions about the Slovak countryside. She was interested in people and mainly relationships between men and women. She based her prose on personal experience, not on a priori concepts. She knew rural people, the intelligentsia and peasants intimately and focuses on these two classes in her novellas and stories (literary critics divide Timrava's work into "gentlemen's" and "folk" prose: the first concerns the rural intelligentsia, in the second she notes the situation in peasant families). But people and their reaction to their surroundings interest her more than social issues. In Timrava's work everything important takes place inside the characters. The external story is always simple; what the characters experience, what is happening inside them, is complicated. The author also provides her rural characters with a variety of emotional and intellectual conflicts. The stories are almost without exception based on collisions of illusions and delusions and ultimately conciliation with reality. Timrava's heroines in particular go through this often painful process (the author's personal experience is certainly in them, because she never married) in a whole range of stories (Za koho ísť? Whom to Marry?, Ťažké položenie - Difficult Situation, Tak je darmo - So it's Useless, Nemilí - Unloved, Pozde - Too Late, Boj - Fight, Bál - Ball, etc.). All of Timrava's work is a critical reaction to the sentimental depiction of love affairs, to the romanticising manner in Slovak prose at the time (this mainly concerns Vajanský and his female epigones such as Ľ. Podjavorinská, T. Vansová and E. Šoltésová). Timrava's analyses of the love affair are sober to cruel. Emotions are always shattered on the sharp edges of reality.
           She also looked at Slovak nationalists equally soberly and without illusions (e.g. in the novella Skúsenosť (Experience), 1902), as she got to know them personally when staying in Dolný Kubín. Under a deposit of great words about the nation, she disclosed their human insignificance. As a whole, Timrava's prose is characterised by the removal of masks and discovery of the real essence of people and problems.
           The most famous of her "folk" novellas is Ťapákovci (The Ťapáks, 1914). It is a story about a family which was tethered in a traditional, conservative way of life and refused to adapt to new, changing conditions. Not even the initiative of a young bride tears the family from this "Oblomovism". The novella Skon Paľa Ročku (The Demise of Paľo Ročko, 1921), whose story goes as far as existentialism, is a profound analysis of the psychology of the rural person.
           Timrava also reacted to dramatic historical events in her work. In the novella Hrdinovia (Heroes, 1919), written during the first world war, she depicted a Slovak village derailed by war and created a whole range of "heroes" and real heroes in dispassionate images. In the novella Záplava (Flood, 1938) she vividly described the invasion of the Hungarian Bolshevik army in Slovakia in 1919, while condemning this invasion as an attempt to reinstall a Hungarian government in Slovakia. In the novellas Všetko za národ (Everything for the Nation, 1926) and Dve doby (Two Eras, 1936) she talks sceptically about the implementation of high ideas in society, because mankind always stays the same. Timrava is a truly original author in both imagination and attitude. In almost nothing did she pick up the threads of past trends. This clearly resulted from the fact that she grew up and lived in a small village in southern Slovakia (essentially in the ethnic border of Slovakia and Hungary), almost completely isolated from cultural developments. (This is why she only had a basic education; she worked as a teacher in a nursery school.) Neither was she influenced by the patriotism spreading from the cultural centre, which was Martin at the time. This only emphasises the acuteness of her natural talent.

Jozef Gregor Tajovský

           The prose writer and playwright Jozef Gregor Tajovský (1874 - 1940) is also from to the second wave of realism (at one time we used the term "critical realism"). He was also a teacher, but later studied at the business academy in Prague and became a bank clerk. In Prague, he came under the influence of the hlasists, and later became closer to social democracy. As a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during the first world war, he defected to the Russian side and joined the Czechoslovak legion. This experience found expression in his prose. The main and basically only genre of Tajovský´s prose was the short story. He published them in periodicals and later collected them into fine volumes, the majority of which he published himself Rozprávky (Tales), 1900; Besednice (Feuilletons), 1903; Rozprávky pre ľud (Tales for the People), 1904; Smutné nôty (Sad Notes), 1907; Spod kosy (From under the Scythe), 1910; Tŕpky (Crab Apples), 1911. For him, too, the countryside is not merely folklore, but a social reality. He sees and depicts it divided into rich and poor, while his sympathies are on the side of the poor. In individual stories the characters are often servants who find themselves under pressure from rich masters, and people from the edge of society in general. The second substantial source of Tajovský's stories is memories of his childhood. The stories are lit up by the author's childhood affection for his grandfather, who brought him up. In his stories from Russia (Rozprávky z Ruska, 1920) he describes his experiences as a prisoner and in the legion and is critical of the October Revolution. Tajovský also preserved his critical view of the world as a publicist. He used a reportage from Kysuce (the poorest Slovak region, also plagued by alcoholism), in which he lingered over the wretched way of life of the rural people, as a harsh criticism of S. H. Vajanský, accusing him of "weak humiliation" of the Slovak people.
           Tajovský's prose was originally inspired by undemanding folk reading and Tolstoy's work for the people. He gained the readers' sympathy with a truthful, i.e. undistorted view of the social face of the countryside, brief, but vividly drawn characters, and emphasis on documentary, through which the author regarded individual "images" of life. Tajovský also animates them through direct intervention into the story, by shifting the narrator to the first person.
           Tajovský achieved greater success as a dramatist. His plays Ženský zákon (Female Law, 1900) and Statky-zmätky (The Troubles with Property, 1909) are still a part of the dramatic repertoire today. Ženský zákon is a comedy where the problems of marrying daughters are "solved"; mothers mainly engage themselves in this process. Statky-zmätky is realist play about the lasting dependence of emotional relationships or love affairs on property. Tajovský continued to concentrate mainly on drama after 1918. He wrote Smrť Ďurka Langsfelda (The Death of Ďurko Langsfeld, 1923), a historical drama set during the 1848 - 49 revolution, and other plays Blúznivci (Visionaries, 1934; Hrdina - Hero), 1938 about the birth of the Czechoslovak Republic. In them he diverges quite far from his personal experience, which does not add to their artistic persuasiveness. He thoroughly studied historical documents for these plays because he wanted them to be historically plausible, but neither of them achieved the success of the first two.
           There is a characteristic tendency towards historicism among the whole generation of realists after 1918. The return to the past was a search for the roots from which the Slovak presence in the free Czechoslovak Republic was born. This presence was on one hand the culmination of the Slovak nation's attempts at emancipation, but on the other hand gave rise to new problems, which complicated e.g. the relationship between the two nations - Czechs and Slovaks. Representatives of the older literary generations were immediately aware of this.
           In the realist period, other women besides Timrava asserted themselves as authors and these gradually brought particular motifs into their literary work. The presence of women in Slovak realist literature was a new phenomenon (poems by female authors appeared in periodicals and almanacs in the Štúrite period, but there were not many - and they were only published under noms de plume) and related to the overall trend towards emancipation in society. As for literature, women writers were in the shadow of male authors for quite a long time (Vajanský had a dominant position and was also a literary model who they tried to emulate). But gradually they found their own forms and their work refreshed and enriched Slovak literature.

Elena Maróthy-Šoltésová

           Elena Maróthy-Šoltésová (1855 - 1939) was a leading organiser of the women's movement, prose writer, publicist, and editor. Her prose was influenced by S. H. Vajanský's work. In the novel Proti prúdu (Against the Tide, 1894) she introduced the same problem as Vajanský in his novel Suchá ratolesť: the return of the land owning squire to the Slovak nation. Šoltésová's novel appeared ten years after Vajanský's and received critical acclaim. Slovak literature already had a range of realist works behind it and so the novel Proti prúdu was regarded as a step backwards. The peak of Šoltésová's work was the book Moje deti (My Children, 1923 - 24), which is more of like a documentary than creative fiction. In it, the author described the life and death of her two children dispassionately and with a deep insight into the child's psyche.
           Terézia Vansová (1857 - 1942) entered literature with sentimental verses and short stories written in German. In her later work she focused on romantic sentiment with a realist approach to life and women's issues. She was intentionally sentimental in the novel Sirota Podhradských (Orphan Podhradský, 1889), which was inspired by Courts-Mahler's novels for children. Her historical novel Kliatba (The Curse, 1926) has elements of horror. Her retrospective prose has a cultural, historical, and also literary importance. In 1898 she started to publish and edit the women´s periodical Dennica, to which members of the upcoming generation of Slovak modernists contributed and which influenced literary development.
           Ľudmila Podjavorinská (real name Riznerová, 1872 - 1951) showed herself to be a talented poet in the book Z vesny života (From the Spring of Life, 1895). The collection did not provide anything new from a developmental standpoint because the author reverted to a romantic style rather than the poetry of Vajanský or Hviezdoslav. She inserted more realism into her prose, although even there she oscillated between the two approaches. Critics rated her novellas V otroctve (In Servitude, 1905), Blud (Fallacy, 1906) and Žena (Woman, 1910) the most highly. It was in these that her prose, based on her knowledge of female characters, reached its peak. She later focused on work for children Zajko Bojko (Scaredy Bunny), Čin-čin (Tweet-Tweet), Baránok boží (Lamb of God). She found "her" genre in ballads Balady - Ballads, 1930).