Vladimír Ferko, together with Vojtech Zamarovský, is considered to be a pioneer of non-fiction literature in Slovakia. After ten years of intensive journalistic work and travel reportage from China
Typhoon is a Fine Wind, he discovered his life's theme and an original manner of its interpretation in A Dowry from Prehistoric Times - the world of nature, both animate and inanimate, perceived as an interesting, even mysterious phenomenon offering an adventure of knowledge. This book on rocks and minerals of Slovakia was published in 1962. In the same year Vojtech Zamarovský published his
Discovery of Troy. Both books brought new themes into literature and a new approach to non-fiction. The adventure of discovery as an important phenomenon of non-fiction is characteristic also for his books
At the Bottom of the World, Thirteen Golden Stones, The Cosmic Caravels, Golden Nostalgia, Diamonds, and Yellow Devil, Yellow God. His knowledge of Slovakia, acquired by a systematic and prolonged study of factual and scientific materials as well as his own research, Ferko put to good use in the encyclopaedic publication A Book on Slovakia, and a pictorial publication of a similar type,
Slovakia - My Native Land. Ferko's long-held aim to present Slovakia as a country rich in culture, history and natural beauties found its consummation in this book. It is a considered choice of information from selected regions of Slovakia composed in such a way that general facts are enriched by regional features thus creating a balanced and rounded picture of the country, its history and natural peculiarities. All these works are dominated by the author's respect towards facts and fact-filled texts. Ferko later moved from a strictly defined genre of non-fiction to a form of a factual essay in his books,
To the World, My Dears, To the World and Love in Slovakia. The first of these is an account of the history of Slovak tinkers drawing on family and regional traditions and the authentic folklore of the tinkers, their destinies and documents, presenting them as a well-informed and enterprising society of craftsmen, who may be assured of their adequate place in the economic history of Slovakia.
Love in Slovakia presents a broad view of the different forms of love in Slovakia and the author used a wide range of archive material, court documents and family chronicles. Though based on fact, the theme is enlivened by its narrative treatment. The level of fabulation in some stories is so dominant that
Love in Slovakia could be considered to lie on the borders of non-fiction and fiction. The tendency towards fictionalisation of themes that the author had already treated in their factual form dominates in
The Truth of Rudo Pravdík and Like Wild Geese (co-authored with his son Andrej) which present prose syntheses of tinker themes. The book
The Hempen Cross occupies a special place in Ferko's work. It is a collection narratives presenting the stories of Slovak people who had been unjustly accused after the war of collaboration with Fascism and deported by the Soviet Army to the Soviet Union, mostly to Siberia and the hell of the gulag. This work, the first of its kind to deal with this theme in Slovak literature, was taken out of the bookshops at the beginning of 'normalisation' and pulped. In 2000 Ferko moved into the genre of the essay.
The Law of Cream is a collection of essays dealing with themes that had been taboo or deliberately suppressed - the co-existence of different ethnic groups within the historically exposed space of Central Europe. After thirty years of cultivating and innovating in the genre of literary fact Ferko is considered to be a classic. His share in the development of the genre was recognized by the award of the Egon Ervin Kisch prize in 1993 for his lifetime contribution to the field of non-fiction. Vladimír Ferko died in 2002.
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