Jozef Cíger Hronský

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.