Víťazoslav Hronec is one of the outstanding writers of the Slovak minority in former Yugoslavia (at present the state of Serbia and Montenegro). He entered literature as a poet in the late 1960's and he has made his presence felt until today. His first work was an important contribution to Slovak minority literature in Yugoslavia. In his poems he programmatically avoided sentimentality and developed those thematic and typological elements of the works of his predecessors that did not concentrate on local colouring. From the beginning he has attempted to create a universally meaningful poetic vocabulary and tended towards classicist poetics. Within the framework of the "triple context" of minority literature, its developpment and typology, Hronec offers an example of an active and creative relationship to the context of all literature written in Slovak, and at the same time to the context of the country of his allegiance as well as its social environment. At the time of his poetic formation he passed through a period of a creative encounter with the poetry of the Slovak Concretists (above all, with the work of Jan Stacho). In concert with the poetics of the Concretists his poems are fully open to the sensual content. There is an effort to comprise the world through one's senses, but at the same time one may observe a certain introspection of the basis and the limits of this knowledge. On the other hand, in the components of his poetics there is also a similar proportion of Serbian poetry of the neo-symbolist tendency with a philosophical subtext, which could be regarded as a certain typological pendant of the poetry of the Slovak Concretists. In this sense his poetry springs from an effort to come to terms with the most momentous existential stuations projected into the coordinates of historical and mythical time. This conception of poetry and its possibilities may be observed especially in his first collections. In the structure of these poems there is a certain web of symbols, which becomes a matrix for moulding meaningful segments of a poem. This web of symbols could be quite precisely reconstructed on the base of word frequency, but even without this we can see that the signs of the natural world (sand, salt, sea, fire) and the signs of the sensual act of being play an equal part in his poetry, and this is evident in the prevalence of verbs of movement. Thus Hronec follows neo-symbolist poetics and in the genesis of his poems he employs to their fullest extent the existentially and phenomenologically significant connections of universal myths and archetypes.
A marked change appears in his poetry and poetics at the beginning of the 1980's when he consciously tried to shed 'poetic' qualities and pathos from his language. One may observe a certain profanation of mythical connections and mythical time, which bears witness to his inclination towards postmodernist and deconstructive poetic methods.
Almost in parallel with his poetry Hronec has also written prose. His collections of stories and a novel represent a successive prose cycle, which is also signalised by the same narrative space and the same characters. In his prose works three typological phases can be sketched. In the first, represented by the collection of stories, 'Draft', we can follow the methods of modern prose with clearly identified insertions of lyrical and metaphorical elements into a narrative text. The subject is foregrounded and through detailed observation wishes to learn an objective world. Loneliness isn't overcome only by participating in the collective, but more especially by self-identification within a reality, which doesn't identify only with the material world. Such (directed) prose of Hronec fully employs methods of meditative narration, often, too, a metaphorical, symbolic naming of events and situations. In his second phase, represented by the collection of stories,
The Lord of the Air and the King's Son, we can see a remarkable inclination to postmodernist narration. This change is closely connected with the change in his poetry and can be defined as an effort to create a new wholeness through the permanent disruption of knowledge and its contexts. Primary here seems to be metatext operations (besides fictitious metatexts also real metatexts in the form of quotations from the works of individual writers). From the point of the noetic point of view there is an expressed scepticism about possibility embracing an image of the world because the world does not show itself as a whole, but in its details. In the third phase, represented by the novel,
Full Draught, Hronec tries a hyper-realistic narration, which is based on a turning away from postmodern formal methods and at inclination towards postmodern elements on a backdrop of fabula.
His efforts in the field of literary criticism and essays are also remarkable. These concentrated mainly on the literature of the Slovaks living in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, which he has observed and from which he has demanded high artistic values. Important, too, is his bibliographical activity - he has published several bibliographical works recording the
Slovak literature in Vojvodina. He is also the compiler of several anthologies of poetry; of these, one should mention especially
The Poetry of the Vojvodina Slovaks (1974) and
An Anthology of Slovak Poetry of the 20th Century (1986). He is also the translator of Slovak poetry into Serbian and Serbian poets into Slovak. Besides many magazine translations his translations of the poetry of Paľo Bohuš (
Izgon, 1979) and Ján Ondruš (
Dvoglavi lutak) 2002) into Serbian are notable.
Read more 
