Scholarly record

POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL OF ANTON BALAZ: THE LAND OF FORGETTING (KRAJINA ZABUDNUTIA)

M.Adamicka

Abstract

The theme of lecture is postcolonial novel in Slovak literature which is a new kind of novel in the Slovakia as the self-colony of Ex-Soviet Union. The lecture analyses the term postcolonial novel as it is defined by prof. Tibor Zilka from Faculty of Central European Studies Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. Postcolonial novel is more precisely defined in the example of the novel Krajina zabudnutia (2000, The Land of Forgetting) written by Anton Balaz, who, on the basis of personal testimonies of surviving Jews, maps the situation of the Jews after the end of the World War II under the conditions of the nascent Czechoslovak socialist establishment. Information about the situation of Jews in the post-war period has become the subject of his work, including the novel The Land of Forgetting. In a retrospective, he deals with the theme of Shoah, racial persecution of Jews during World War II, and also with the theme of traumas (phobia from dirt and nudity), which the surviving Jews experienced as a result of the horrors in the concentration camps. Nowadays, the topics of the anti-Semitism during the war and in the post-war period is more than actual. Because of this fact it is one of the topics of postcolonial novel in Slovak literature - it was one of the themes tabooed between 1948 – 1989.

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