First name

Jozef Cíger

Birth date

23. 02. 1896  [en] Zvolen

Death date

13. 07. 1960  [en] Luján (Argentína)

Fields of interest

próza, literatúra pre deti a mládež

Briefly about author

Hronský's prose work, especially his great novels Jozef Mak, The Scrivener, Gráč and Andreas Búr, the Master mark one of the most important directions in modern Slovak prose. In his shorter prose, since the end of the 1920's he tries to show the social and psychological features of Slovak village life. It is evident that the narrator's voice is dominant above the story with narrative irony and showing the protagonist in a state of psychic torment and suffering.
In the first half of the 1930's, the first Hronský's novels Bread and Jozef Mak appeared. These are written in evocative language full of an interior expressiveness and psychological depth of the heroes.
At the beginning of the 1940's, he published the novel The Scrivener, Gráč and in emigration the next key novel was Andreas Búr, the Master. Jozef Mak, "a man-in-a-million" in the author's conception is a symbol of yielding to fate, to certain bitterness but not toresignation; his fundamental psychic state is suffering. The stylistic specifics of this and other novels by Hronský address the protagonists, their curse and their struggle to get free of a state of passivity and the difficulty of life. While Jozef Mak represents the pathos of the human condition, the Scrivener, Gráč adds an ironical undertone. Over the fable the narrator dominates responding to the writer's assessment of the situation, events and protagonists and the whole novel appears as the narrator's monologue. Critics of the time saw the novel as an experiment and were unable to relate to it.
The conscious of Gráč (Hráč, i. e. Player or Gambler with the game as the base motif of the novel) is chaotic and corresponds with the instability of the time when the work was conceived. It is a masterly portrait of the approaching catastrophe of war. Here already is the theme of the destructive individual, a home lost and being
a stranger in the world and estranged among people. The theme of loneliness and loss of fundamental certainty reaches its apex in the novel Andreas Búr, the Master, which is also a stylistic reflection of a dramatic change in Hronský's human situation (involuntary emigration) and also an attempt to find sustenance in timeless theme of the creation of art. The tragic feeling of life in Hronský's art culminates in the novel
A World in a Quagmire, where he returns to the events of the war in Slovakia. Here, the central themes of modern literature in the 20 th century prevail: the violence of man towards man and the suffering resulting from the inability of people to communicate. Slovak issues in Hronský's work gained a universal expression and his novels seem to be an integral part of the contemporary European heritage.

Briefly about production

prose:
(short stories and novellas): At Our House (U nás doma, 1923), Home (Domov, 1925), Honey Heart (Medové srdce, 1929), The Yellow House in Klokočov(Žltý dom v Klokočove, 1927), Podpolianske Tales (Podpolianske rozprávky, 1932), The Tomčíks (Tomčíkovci, 1933), The Tasty Fly (Šmákova mucha, 1944), Seven Hearts (Sedem sŕdc, 1947); (novels): Doctor Stankovsky's Prophecy (Proroctvo doktora Stankovského, 1930), Bread (Chlieb, 1932), Jozef Mak (Jozef Mak, 1933), At the Cross-Roads (Na krížnych cestách, 1939), The Scrivener, Gráč (Pisár Gráč, 1940), In the Bukva Courtyard (Na Bukvovom dvore, 1944), Andreas Búr, the Master (Andreas Búr Majster, 1948), World in a Quagmire (Svet na trasovisku, 1960)

children's books:
Courageous Rabbit (Smelý zajko, 1930), Courageous Rabbit in Africa (Smelý zajko v Afrike, 1931), Budkáčik and Dubkáčik (Budkáčik a Dubkáčik, 1932), Three Clever Little Goats (Tri múdre kozliatka, 1940)

essays:
A Journey through Slovak America (Cesta slovenskou Amerikou, 1940)

works translated:
Podpolianske Tales (1948 German) In the Bukva Courtyard (1977 Polish) Jozef Mak (1985 English)

Biography for author

Born 23 February 1896 in Zvolen. He graduated at the Teacher's Institute in Levice and served as a soldier in the First World War. After returning from the Italian front he worked as a teacher for a decade. In 1932 he became the secretary and in 1940 the administrator of Matica Slovenská in Martin. After the end of the Second World War he emigrated, as he was afraid of political persecution. Through Austria and Italy he went to Argentina where he wrote sporadically. Hronský died in Luján, Argentina 13 July 1960.

about author

It is sufficient to say that he isn't one of many, but he is among the first. And in some things simply the first. Counting conservatively, there are at least five works: Bread, Jozef Mak, Seven Hearts, The Scrivener, Gráč, and Andreas Búr, the Master. Hronský had something to say and he knew how to say it because he was always discovering himself and did not deal complacently once he had found that.

Slovak expressionism in the Hronský variant appears to be a productive literary method where in a roundabout way readers find out something about themselves, that is if people capable of intellectual self-reflection consider themselves to be readers; the intelligent reader in the mirror of a simple yet humanly true person, "the simple" literary protagonist. In it, there is not only an individual variant, conditioned by Slovak cultural conditions, but also the contribution of Slovak, particularly Hronský's prose, to the context of European literature in a certain epoch. The reality of passion in its original purity, suffering in unimaginable depth is the contribution of the best Slovak prose to the context of world literature in the 1930's.

Slovak literature of the 20 th century is part of the contemporary European development. The work of Jozef Cíger Hronský has contributed to this. Hronský's man is a typically modern man (especially his self-reflecting protagonists, Gráč and Búr), lost in his own hypertrophied 'I' in skewed picture of the world. In the whole part of the imagination, of the subconscious represented in a Slovak context by naturism and surrealism, as with the tragic feeling for life, Hronský's work belongs to the Slovak avantgarde as one of the existential experiments in prose.

We return to Hronský slowly, with effort, through the layers of time and through obstacles within ourselves, but we return to him with the instinct of a people who thirsts, for whom a connection with his word is a vital inevitability. Such river returns to its source.

Sample

THE SCRIVENER, GRÁČ (extract)