Štúdie

On a June evening in 2007 I arrived at the Prašná Bašta (Dusty Wall) bar and restaurant in Bratislava to listen to the Požoň Sentimentál group. The Prašná Bašta is tucked in a maze of cobblestone streets against a hillside that is topped by the historic city castle and the Communist era parliament building. The entrance to the Prašná Bašta branches into a small record store, another bar called Café Kut, and an entrance to flats above. The Prašná Bašta includes an indoor space and a courtyard, the back of which comprises the bare stone wall of the town fortifications dating from the sixteenth century. A black-and-white poster tacked to the courtyard entrance announced the performance that week of Požoň Sentimentál (hereafter PS). Photographed from above, the four members of the group wore quasi-military uniforms that evoked the region’s military band tradition and also the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Under a canopy against the building’s wall and opposite the fortification ruins, the four members of the group comprising accordion, violin, flute, and piano all set up portable music stands. Beginning without announcement, they leafed through thick notebooks of scores as they decided on the spot what to play. Unlike their attire for the poster, the musicians wore t-shirts, jeans, shorts, and sandals, and they did not use amplification. This evening started out partly as a command performance for me: the group pulled out their only piece in the Lydian mode connoting the countryside of northern and eastern Slovakia. They went on to play pieces in march, waltz, and tango rhythms, each very short and each with startling style switches, intervallic repetition, or distant chord modulations. Only some of those present, the theatre performers with whom PS members collaborate and their children, had come specifically to hear PS play. The audience members had to know the group’s oeuvre to experience the irony and jokes within the titles of some of these pieces, since the ensemble played each selection without announcement. The people in the courtyard chatted in Slovak, drank wine, and ate, but never applauded. As I prepared to leave, the group switched to their arrangements of rock music.
The PS members deliberately made their performance seem ordinary. Similarly the location in a cluster of three businesses supporting alternative arts was not accidental. It only reflected one small part of the musicians’ activities; five months later in October 2007, the members of PS were some of the organizers, hosts, and performers at the annual Večery novej hudby (Evenings of New Music) festival. Held at two small theatre venues, the festival’s programs included music by John Cage, Morton Feldman, and PS’s pianist. During the 1990s and early 2000s, with such activities young composers and artists were opposing the “splendid isolation” (Uličianska 2000:214) of Slovakia’s arts institutions. As part of this movement, the music group Požoň Sentimentál dramatized Bratislava as the city had existed a century earlier. Its humorous enactments provoked disputes over how to represent the city’s former ethnic groups, how to acknowledge its smallness in relationship to its neighbors, and by extension over the history that had erased these two realities.

I. Bratislava as a Marginocentric City

Bratislava and many other cities in Eastern Europe used to be “simultaneously marginal and central” (Boym 2001:128). They were more important to the surrounding region than to nation or empire, were comprised of different ethnic groups, and saw these characteristics decline during the twentieth century (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2002: 26, 30). The cities are a now locus both for “restorative nostalgia” that tries to reconstruct and rebuild, and for a “reflective nostalgia” that consciously considers parts of the past (Boym 2001:41, 124-46). Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, in their discussion of the region’s literary cultures, argue that the notion of marginocentricity is what brings in deliberate thought and “dialogic” interpretation. The exchange between local interests comprises an “interactive cultural space.” These cities’ locations on borders and their pluralism allowed them to influence national hegemonies on an irregular basis (2002:26-28). Literature and other art representing the marginocentric city has highlighted resemblances to metropolitan centers such as Vienna or Paris. Yet, in addressing uncivilized nature as well as high culture, by incorporating fantasy, and in depicting aspects of the periphery, it “challenge[d] the techno-rationalist discourse of the Western city” earlier and more consistently than West European arts (2002:27).
Philip Bohlman’s discussion of Czernowitz/Černivci/Cernăuţi illustrates the complexities of the marginocentric city’s expressive culture, the limits of the arts and other endeavors to discipline its history, and yet how energetic are the efforts to imagine, restore, or reinterpret parts of the urban community. Bohlman outlines the history of Czernowitz when it came under the Habsburg Monarchy in the early 19th century. It was a meeting ground for at least six ethnolinguistic groups as well as for Jews. It nourished a variety of modernist and modernizing Jewish movements (2011:239). Bohlman reframes the view that it was the Habsburg and Dual Monarchies that fostered multiculturalism by proposing that Jewish utopian movements drove the cosmopolitanism of such places as Czernowitz; with musical manifestations extending from new cantorial styles to Jewish cabaret, the visionaries created “Jewish fantasy cities” from such locales (2008:162, 166, 174). But by the millennium, Bohlman points out, Czernowitz’s citizens are ethnolinguistically Ukrainian or Romanian, and he states that they exert themselves to forget both the city’s role in the Holocaust and its Sovietization (2011:239-40). In the 2000s, “[t]he New European metropolis is the virtual image of its historical predecessors” (2011:238). In Czernowitz pure mercantilism replicates the Habsburg imperial influence; old Austrian businesses have repenetrated Czernowitz. A movement to resurrect the music of the Germans who once populated Eastern Europe gives great importance to Czernowitz. Most remarkable, Bohlman states, is how many Jewish musical revivalists evoke and/or draw on the music of Czernowitz and its surrounding Bukovina region (2011:240).
The East European city thus encapsulates the problem of “too many pasts” as explicated by Tony Judt (2000:307). Judt argues that the European countries and their citizenry immediately needed to forget the genocide and ethnic population transfers that transformed the cities. Although focusing on positive and unified futures (whether Communist or capitalist) did keep vicious rhetoric out of the public discourse, Judt believes that it was “fundamentally false” and isolating (2000:291). Each undiscussed version of the past felt threatened “by the occupants of a neighboring island of memory” (2000:307). Euroregion initiatives attempted a new start. In these initiatives whereby national governments and the European Union would designate a cross-border zone and assist commercial and cultural exchanges, old regional cities appeared to renew their significance. Yet in Eastern Europe, such ventures have been temporary and not well funded (Batt 2002, Hann 1998). The indigenous revival of Bratislava, whereby residents considered the many facets of their city as it existed before 1919, stands out as an exception. The revival countered and exposed the effects of Fascism, Communism, Slovak national identity politics of the 1990s under Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar, and of capitalism.
Bratislava lies on the Danube River between Budapest and Vienna; the latter city is less than 50 km away. Its geography as a meeting point between cultures well preceded its “ ambiguous position” between the two imperial centers; it was at the junction of two important land routes as well as three wedges of land, each populated by a different ethnic group (Babejová 2003:25, 154, 156). Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bratislava was the coronation city for Hungarian kings and hosted many significant cultural activities of the Austrian nobility. The city became just a “provincial town” after the mid-19th century when Bratislava’s official functions were transferred to Budapest and it became subject to the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy (Babejová 2003: 21). The city was somewhat important during the periods 1918-39 and 1948-93 as the capital of the Slovak half of Czechoslovakia (at which time it was given its current name Bratislava; see Bugge 2004), but it did not have standing equivalent to Prague. It was the capital of the Slovak Republic, a Nazi ally, from 1939-45. Since 1993 it is the capital city of the Republic of Slovakia and it has become the center of very rapid commercial development (Fisher 2006). The ethnic, confessional, and class makeup of the city changed markedly several times between 1867 and the present day, and its population increased from 50,500 in 1890 to 442,000 in 1990 (Salner 2001:24).
Bratislava’s population was comprised mainly of Slovak, German, and Hungarian speakers; Serbs and Croats also lived in the city (Babejová 2003:37). This was symbolized by three variants in the city name, Pressburg/Pozsony/Prešporok in German, Hungarian, and Slovak respectively, as well as many other transliterations (see Bugge 2004:206. I will refer to the pre-1919 city as Pressburg). From the eighteenth century, Jews had formed a strong community in Pressburg; one of Europe’s most famous yeshivas was established there under the leadership of Rabbi Moses Sofer. Until World War II, Jews moved back and forth between Pressburg and Vienna depending on which city was safer. Roma also lived in the city (Crowe 1994: 41). Peter Salner finds that at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, the population of Pressburg was predominantly German and that the city was at its most diverse then (2001:236, 240). The years 1867-1918 saw such a great decrease in those claiming German ethnicity and a large upsurge in those claiming Hungarian ethnicity that the Hungarian number must have included many ethnic Germans and Jews strategically reassigning their own ethnicity and/or identifying strongly with Hungarian culture (Salner 2001:237, Babejová 2003:357). Upon the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 (and the redrawing of borders so that Pressburg was now separated from Vienna and from Hungary), Germans and Hungarians left the city. In addition, according to Salner (2001:237), a number of townspeople simply reclassified their ethnicity as Czechoslovak. The 1938-89 period saw massive and irrevocable social engineering in the city. Salner concluded from his ethnography and oral history with older Bratislava denizens that they changed their last names, disguised middle-class backgrounds, claimed different religious affiliations, or denied them altogether in response to the repressions of Fascism and Communism. Many town residents obscured their ethnic and class backgrounds even from family members (Salner 2001: 237, 239). Between 1940 and 1945, Jews were expelled and deported; 60% of the city’s Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust (Silber 2010). The Slovaks expelled Czechs in the late 1930s; Germans were expelled in 1945 and Hungarians migrated out of the city (Salner 2001:237). Major building projects sealed these changes. In the 1940s, the city’s historic Jewish cemetery was confiscated and graves relocated to make way for a tunnel underneath the city castle; just a few graves including that of the Rabbi Sofer were left intact (Borský et al. n.d.:6). The Communist government constructed the Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising (Most SNP/Most slovenského národného povstania) over the Danube in the late 1960s. Symbolizing the way that the Communist state intended to make a new Bratislava, the bridge included a futuristic angled tower; a saucer-shaped observation deck and restaurant (colloquially called and then in the mid-2000s officially named, the UFO) topped this massive structure (Šebo 2009: 28-29). The project demolished almost the entire Jewish quarter in order to erect the bridgehead. The city tripled in size from 124,000 in 1930 to 442,000 in 1990. The government erected a vast expanse of panelak apartment blocks across the Danube River from old Bratislava in the 1970s. Named Petržalka, it was originally a village and set of feudal lands called Engerau --and from the 1950s to the 1970s a popular hiking locale (Šebo 2009:19). The apartment blocks housed working-class Slovaks originally from the countryside, and by 1990 those people claiming Slovak ethnicity comprised 90% of the city’s population (Salner 2001: 241). With the opening of the society from 1990-92, Salner reports that many Bratislava residents stopped obscuring their original ethnicities or religious affiliations. Sofer’s gravesite was restored and a shrine to Sofer was erected. Pressburg identity became a way to resist monoethnic nationalism that became prevalent in 1993 as Slovakia and the Czech Republic split (2001:243).
Pressburg was notable in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its many aspirants to the middle class. Eleonóra Babejová’s recent history argues that this applied to all ethnic groups. Babejová finds that Germans predominated in the middle class (although Jewish and Hungarian middle-class numbers increased from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and Serbs and Croats lived in one of the city’s middle-class neighborhoods). At the turn of the century, there was a small Slovak elite, separated from other Slovaks who were workers (Babejová 2003:31-32, 37, 142). City residents were active in types of voluntary association such as salon evenings, Liedertafeln, and sporting associations that connoted the middle class (Babejová 2003:62-63, Lengová 2010). Middle-class aspirations were “opportunist and somewhat provincial” (van Duin 2009:72). Babejová believes that the peaceful quality of worker demonstrations at the turn of the century indicated a wish to join and not to tear town the city’s commercial and professional function (2003:105-152). As government requirements to speak Hungarian expanded, an increasing number of Magyar residents had modest occupations such as teacher (Babejová 2003:64, 222). Jews entered a variety of occupations as they experienced opportunities to assimilate (Salner 1997:155). In the 19th century, illustrated Hungarian humor magazines (élclapok) lampooned these aspirations by depicting a general type of town resident who had a very small enterprise (such as local vintner) and who, Magyar or not, did not speak Hungarian correctly (Szabolcsi 542); the special Pressburg variant of this character type was “Tóbiás Kraxelhuber.” Like the Hungarians before them, Czechoslovak leaders of the interwar period associated this type with the city’s ethnic Germans and derided them (van Duin 2003:107). Derision of the middle class became persecution in the infamous “Action B” of the Stalinist period, when some of the city’s bourgeois were forcibly relocated to the countryside and their property expropriated (Salner 2001:243).
Residents affiliated very strongly with the city throughout the 19th century. Babejová finds three components of this “Pressburg identity” (2003:85-90). First was the sense that the city was triethnic and its residents trilingual. Speech practice differed somewhat from this vision. The residents had varying levels of competency in the three languages. Secondly, there was a sense of tolerance symbolized by ethnic mixing, but there was class segregation, in public areas like promenades or coffeehouses (Salner 2001:237-238, Babejová 2003:87-88). Thirdly, Pressburgers demonstrated “loyalty to the city” by being involved in charitable and civic organizations (Babejová 2003:89). Some historians argue that Pressburg identity was a defense against the Dual Monarchy’s Magyarization efforts (Babejová 2003:89, Engemann 2003:254); another less common view is that it developed post-Trianon as a response to the efforts of the Czechoslovak Republic at German and Magyar “denationalization” (van Duin 2009:402). Secular Jews treasured the tolerance and freedom of the Pressburger identity, according to Holocaust testimonies that Peter Salner collected (1997:156-58). Salner’s female subjects in particular recalled that the coffeehouse environment allowed them to move and associate freely (Salner 1997:157-58). Despite the symbol of the coffeehouse as a positive expression of Habsburg cosmopolitanism (Drakulić 1996), public gathering places for the ethnic groups differed. Magyar and Magyar-speaking elites congregated at cafes, ethnic Germans at wine-cellars, and Slovak workers at pubs (Babejová 2003: 100, 385, Salner et al. 1991:15-16). A specific Slovak identity for the city was finally asserted and won starting in 1919, with the city’s change of name to Bratislava (Bugge 2004).
The 1990s and 2000s marked a revival of Pressburg identity. This revival was multifaceted to an extraordinary degree; as Iris Engemann notes, for city denizens “the memory of its multicultural past” is kept “in an act of self-affirmation (Selbstversicherung) and in the marketing of the city” (Engemann 2012:262). The arts, the academy, and the tourism trade all recaptured Pressburg. Ethnologists and historians at the Academy of Sciences (VEDA) in Bratislava had conducted research and then in 1987 published articles on the city’s history in the Academy’s specialist publication Slovenský národopis (Slovak Folklore). In 1991, Taká bola Bratislava (Such Was Bratislava) introduced this work to the general public in a coffee-table format with sepia-toned photographs and text, reproductions of pre-1930s advertisements, and a center section reprinting old color-postcards of the city. Chapters discussed family life, civic associations, the social season, wine-cellar life, café life, and promenading (Salner et al. 1991). Historians examined a plethora of document types to review the changes in interethnic and class relations from the Dual Monarchy, through the establishment of Communism (Engemann 2012, Babejová 2003, van Duin 2009), as well as discussing changes within the city’s Jewish community during the same period (Salner 2000, Klein-Pejšová 2009). Musicological research explored composers, institutions, and style characteristics of the nineteenth century, focusing on the Pressburg activities of composers and musicians who also worked in western Hungary, Vienna, or Budapest (Lengová 2010, Laki 1996). A posthumously-published autobiography by Jan “Hansi” Albrecht, a descendant of the city’s major musical family whose life spanned the interwar period through post-Communism, sees his own life as in a “cultural and human diaspora” (1998:5). He recalls the contributions to the city’s musical life of his father’s generation (that drew on Germanic traditions) and addresses the period of 1948-1989, particularly the immediate post-1968 period when several significant contemporary composers left the country (1998:78-79). Some city research of the mid-1990s was supported by the Austrian government. The Ministry of Science and Transport funded an expansive research project called Grenzenlöses Österreich (Borderless Austria). The published included a book on the middle class in Slovakia during the twentieth century (Mannová, ed. 1997).
Internal and foreign tourists take in variegated experiences of the city’s past. The Ifjú Szívek, a professional folk dance group whose members come from the Hungarian minority communities in Slovakia, stage shows for Danube cruise passengers. Their programs convey nostalgia for the 1867-1918 period by representing the village song and dance of ethnic groups from the former territory of the Dual Monarchy. Tourism relating to Jewish history and culture differs from that in other parts of east-central Europe in that visitors are predominantly ultra-Orthodox who come to pray at Moses Sofer’s grave. Slovaks have become very interested in the popular music of the Interwar period. Slovak Radio and the Music Fund-Slovakia (Hudobný Fond) reissued recordings of schlagers from the 1930s. In the mid-2000s, 3Art, an organizer of folk dance tours and entertainment for company receptions as well as other private events, offered performers of 1920s popular dance as one entertainment option. Local aficionados resurrected the Slovak tango, an idiom that in the 1910s Pressburgers had taken up almost instantly from Paris and that Slovak students had indigenized in the 1930s (Lengová 2004:225-226; Lukáčová 2010:87-88). The Bratislava City Museum, in the mid-2000s only accessible through an inner courtyard of the old city hall and only with Slovak information literature, retains the civic identity that helped to found it in 1868. One exhibition of the mid-2000s featured material culture of the turn of the century. Model home interiors showed modest yet contemporaneous furnishings and décor; street photos of the day showed shop fronts, transportation modes, and house exteriors. These representations stressed some elements of the city’s previous culture and left out others. Just as one example, I noted that the signage was trilingual in the Interwar period streetscape photos of the City Museum exhibit and yet Slovak names were larger. The information cards did not explain that the Interwar Czechoslovak Republic had passed a regulation that Slovak should predominate but not exclude German and Hungarian (see Bugge 2004). Neither popular culture nor the academy explored the bumbling middle-class aspirant as a humorous type. Thus, as Engemann reflects, Pressburg “is a place of longing, from which has been hidden (ausgeblendet) the competing national claims, administrative struggles, and violent upheavals that have shaped the character of the city today” (2012: 262).
Alternative art contributed to Pressburg identity by playing on mainstream and forgotten motifs of the city’s history. The young writer Michal Hvorecký incorporated many aspects of popular culture into his fiction but articulated his perspective as a Bratislava resident. Egon Bondy made a major contribution to Slovak arts and letters. He is best known in the West as having supplied surrealist and absurdist poetry that the Czech rock group Plastic People of the Universe used for lyrics in the 1960s and 1970s. When the Czech and Slovak Republics split in 1993, Bondy had taken up residence in Bratislava. He became an omnipresent and supportive figure at cultural events there (Piaček 2007b). Although he was a Czech speaker, Bondy wrote a novel and essays in Slovak. Bondy’s novel Epizóda ’96 is a mystery with a polymotivic style. It has laconic phraseology and an alienated protagonist resonant of Raymond Chandler’s work, but Petržalka and the Old Town of Bratislava provide its local color. He depicts a bare wasteland atmosphere in Petržalka’s cement blocks, and invents a history behind the enigmatic, Gothic-looking “character heads” of the 18th-century sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt who himself had a mysterious past. The alternative theatre group Stoka (Sewer) was also important in the 1990s. Blaho Uhlár, its director, founded the group very soon after the end of Communism. He assembled players to collectively author the company’s pieces on the basis of improvisations (Quinn 1995). A number of Stoka’s productions were multilingual, encompassing Slovak, English, German, and Serbian. Nearly all of the pieces portrayed personalized details of alienation and sadness that are usually not considered right for public spaces; some of the pieces juxtaposed these states with the ways of acting seen in commercials and other parts of the mass media. This style of art implicitly resisted the cultural and political atmosphere under Vladimír Mečiar, as well as global capitalism. Mečiar and his coalition partners the ultranationalist SNS (Slovenská národná strana, Slovak National Party) governed the Slovak Republic from 1993 to early 1994 and again from late 1994 until 1998. Under Mečiar and the SNS (which was given the cultural portfolio), not only was monoethnic nationalism emphasized, but public life continued to be bifurcated as in the Communist era. There were official events and spaces – national and regional theatre buildings and their repertory shows of standard theatre fare, and symphony orchestras playing music of the common practice period. Advocates for the alternative arts objected verbally and in performance to what they saw as their marginalization and lack of regular funding; they pointed out that they were producing native work and attracting new audiences (Zajac 1997:197-199).
Music associated with these dramatic and literary efforts combined some mainstream sounds with local references that had been discarded or forgotten. Hvorecký co-founded and for a number of years helped to run a large festival of electronic dance music. He named it Wilsonic in honor of a name for the city that was associated with peacemaking and had been proposed in 1918: Wilsonovo Mesto ([Woodrow] Wilson’s City; Bugge 2004:206). A well-loved musical component of Stoka was the band Živé kvety (Living Flowers), comprised of several actors from the troupe. Its melodies, harmonies, and instrumentation were in a sparse punk rock vein, whereas its lyrics conveyed a set of feeling states through vivid metaphors. Another troupe member, Ľubo Burgr, had produced the album Ali ibn Rachid in 1992 before joining Stoka. Slovak audiences felt this music was revelatory for its interiorized reflections and its languages, including a stigmatized regional dialect, that were spoken or screamed rather than sung (Salontay 2007). Požoň Sentimentál contributed a classical music standpoint to this environment with hyperlocal references, Anglo-American postmodernism, and its performance of Pressburg nostalgia as conceptual art. PS’s early activities disturbed institutions of high culture. In a more unexpected provocation, the group clashed with the reconstruction of Jewish culture.

Požoň Sentimentál and the Aesthetic of Požonism

Požoň Sentimentál solidified as a group in 1995 with four core members: Marek Piaček, flute; Peter Zagar, piano; Boris Lenko, accordion; and Ľubo Burgr, violin. As Piaček emphasized to me, all of the group members had stayed in Slovakia for university, (2007a; before 1993, Slovaks could attend such Czech institutions as the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague or the Brno Conservatory). They were all very conversant in the West European languages and held many fellowships abroad. It is notable that no group member had a Pressburg ancestry. Piaček (b. 1971), who was just finishing University and in his mid-twenties, relates that his family had only been in Bratislava for two generations. Piaček studied composition at the VŠMU (University of Fine Arts) in Bratislava. Zagar (b. 1961) was also born in Bratislava, but his father’s family had emigrated from Slovenia. He completed studies in composition at the predecessor of the VŠMU, the Hudobná a tanečná fakulta Vysokej školy múzických umení (Faculty of Music and Dance of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Bratislava. Burgr (b. 1964) was from the city of Prešov in the eastern part of the country. He had studied violin at University in the eastern city of Košice and played in a theatre orchestra there. In 1990 he moved to Bratislava to join Stoka as musician, composer, and actor. He also studied composition at VŠMU. Boris Lenko (b. 1965) was from Ružomberok in the eastern part of the country. He studied at the conservatory in Žilina in central Slovakia before coming to VŠMU for graduate study in accordion performance. Lenko played all periods of classical music, including new music, and tango. The background of these musicians illustrates that they are part of the demographic shift by which people from outside, mostly Slovaks from the provinces, have migrated in to Bratislava. It illustrates that these musicians all chose to build local musical culture, and it also indicates that they may have had something of an outsider’s fascination with Pressburg’s ethnic and class history.
“Požoň Sentimentál” was originally a title that Zagar, the composer Daniel Matej, and several other musicians chose for a 1994 concert of their new-music collective VENI Piaček was also a young member of VENI and took part in the concert. At the time, not only was Pressburg nostalgia suffusing the city, but these composers and musicians in their twenties and thirties were trying to introduce minimalism, Anglo-American experimental music, and electroacoustic music into Slovakia. In the mid-1990s Matej was a very active organizer of performances in Bratislava. He produced a radio program for contemporary music and founded and managed the Evenings of New Music festival; the latter was notable for bringing composers such as John Cage to the country, as well as inviting Slovak contributors (Šťastný 2007a:52). The concert’s location in a Communist relic, the culture house of the Dúbravka district fairly distant from the Old City core, indicated the marginality and underground sense of this new-music direction at the time. Piaček explained that the concert marked two important iniatives: first, to incorporate more improvisation and write music inspired by Cage, Morton Feldman and others; and second, to re-perform the past represented by the “Požoň Sentimentál” title. One section of the concert is still remembered for the collective free improvisation in one of Matej’s openly scored pieces and for its electroacoustic sounds; the group that played on that half later took the name Vapori del cuore. The other section consisted of humorous pieces spoofing clichés of Central Europe. “Požoň” transliterated the Hungarian city name into Slovak. Zagar and Matej wanted to convey something that never quite existed (Piaček 2007b), and they were able to do this because this was one of the variegated and now forgotten transliterations that had existed before 1919. Evoking the city’s Hungarian past was symbolically a counterweight to the heated anti-Hungarian rhetoric of the Mečiar government and the SNS. One of Zagar’s contributions illustrates the atmosphere that the musicians intended to create for this half of the concert. He set an evergreen Slovak hit. Listoček z brezy (Birch Leaves) is a polka in verse-chorus form. The text depicts the rural stereotype of a girl sitting under a birch tree next to a brook. Zagar indicated to me that he wrote such music to balance his more serious efforts (2007). The choice of piece points to the reason for sentimentál to be part of the concert’s title: it disrupts the idea (then very prevalent in the Slovak academy) that contemporary classical music needs to be original, complex, aesthetically elevated, and progress the canon.
The Požoň Sentimentál idea lay dormant until the following year, when Zagar and Piaček set about expanding the group’s aesthetics and repertoire. Matej might also have been a participant but for his burgeoning interest in improvisation and his departure to Berlin for a DAAD fellowship in 1995-1996 (see Šťastný 2007a:52). Uhlár asked Zagar to put together some music to accompany a Cocteau film. Piaček relates that although for this event they played pieces such as Brecht songs, they used solo accordion and then a configuration of violin, flute, and piano. This gave them the idea for a quartet formation. Piaček recalls that Zagar then had the idea to expand the name for the group, prefacing “Požoň Sentimentál” with “Malomestský komorný orchester” (Piaček 2007b). Malomestský translates literally as “small-town” but it also implies “small-minded.” Thus the full name of the group, “Malomestský komorný orchester Požoň Sentimentál” means “The Small-minded/Small-town Chamber Orchestra Požoň Sentimentál.” Like the nineteenth-century humor magazines, the revised name called up the prototype of the aspiring citizen and the way that such citizens used art music for social advancement (see Hanson 1985). It also illustrated that the PS members and young composers in general were very conscious of the irony that they, as citizens of the tiny marginal nation of Slovakia, had large aspirations in new music. The members of PS then set about creating and generating a repertoire, organizing performance engagements, articulating an aesthetic, and connecting with older members of the arts community who were receptive to their ideas.
Burgr and Piaček looked for fin-de-siecle compositions. Burgr arranged “Hopak,” a piece of sheet music with a Lydian-mode tune that he had found at the Prešov theatre. Ladislav Burlas’s concise history Slovenská hudobná moderna (Slovak Musical Modernism) inspired some of Piaček’s choices. Burlas describes several predecessors to Interwar modernism who tried to incorporate folkloristic elements but who primarily wrote virtuosic piano music in the vein of Liszt. Inspired by Burlas’s wry comment that by the 1920s “their attempts at Slovak-sounding music no longer overcame [their] achieved aspirations” and Burlas’s description of Dezider Lauko (1872-1942; Burlas 1983:18), Piaček arranged several Lauko pieces for PS including one in which he compressed the harmonic framework to just a few minutes. Piaček also consulted a 1913 publication of the Pressburger Zeitung in honor of the newspaper’s 150-year anniversary that had included Unterhaltungsblätter (entertainment music) scores. This publication included Bartók’s student opus Danse orientale, but Piaček selected a different incidental piece, the Trio from the Ungarischen Magnaten Marsch (March of the Hungarian Magnates) by Josef Striczl, the Kapellmeister of the Hungarian army regiment that was stationed in Pressburg at the time. Piaček commented that although the bombastic-sounding piece was “stupid,” the PS members thought it fit their sound (in fact even the Pressburger Zeitung’s music critic of the day, Johann Batka, added some humor when he thanked “our beloved Army Kapellmeister” for the score of his “pompous” march (Piaček 2007a, Batka in Lengová 2006:219).
The ensemble issued a call for newly composed scores and disseminated it to composers in neighboring countries in 1996 and again in 1998. A requested time length of under five minutes ensured that the pieces would be miniatures. With some frustration still evident in his voice even a decade after the fact when he spoke to me, Piaček explained that the quartet of players wanted to perform at classical music events and venues:

We wanted it to be… that they accept us, the organizers. So we said we will make the first step. We will not wait, we will make the first step. We will ask composers to write for us… There are some rules that, for example, the music should be connected with the place [where] you live or [that] you like… feeling from the music should be regional more than national, so, not connected to the Slovak folklore, not for folklore but for the region you live [in]. This middle Europe feeling is more important. (2007a)

Thus the PS members made performance art out of their commission. It enacted the ensemble members’ status as young outsiders to the academy; large aspirations analogous to those of the Pressburg citizens; and the serious intent to establish new music in the face of continued conservatism from the Bratislava music institutions. Piaček reports that approximately twenty composers sent pieces. Mostly Slovak composers responded, although there were also contributions from France, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. Most writers were from the same generation as the PS musicians, but there were contributions from others such as Ilja Zeljenka, a professor at VŠMU and teacher of Piaček. Piaček explained that of these compositions, about half were played in concert one or two times. The ensemble played the other pieces on a regular basis at its monthly café performances or at concerts. The main criteria for keeping a piece in the repertoire beyond a single formal concert were that apiece should have “the feeling of Požoň” and that it not be too uncomfortable for the casual listener. As an example, Piaček described how Pavol Šimaj, a Slovak composer born in 1930 and who had emigrated to Sweden in 1968, contributed a piece in 1998 that the group seldom played because it was ten minutes long and quite dissonant (2007a).
Temporarily, PS did gain entry into established arts venues with these commissions. In late November 1996, the group played pieces composed by them and the pieces from historical sources that they had arranged on a Slovak new-music concert at a combined recital, recording, and broadcast venue, Studio 2 of Slovak Broadcasting. In June 1997, the group premiered the results of its 1996 call for scores at the Mirbach Palace. This location distilled PS’s ambivalent relationship to institutionalized classical music. The Mirbach embodied Pressburg in that it was a historic home of the upper bourgeoisie, not a palace in the sense of huge Austrian and Hungarian noble estates. PS’s style of music might have resounded frequently at social gatherings in the Mirbach at the fin de siècle, but at the present time, it is formal chamber music concerts that are staged there.
In late 1997, Piaček and Zagar made a presentation to a symposium of the Europäischen Konferenz der Veranstalter Neuer Musik European Conference of Promoters of New Music [ECPNM]) concurrent with the Melos-Étos biannual International Contemporary Music Festival. The symposium audience was comprised of composers and contemporary music advocates from Central and East-Central Europe, as well as Slovak composers and others involved in performance and dissemination of the country’s twentieth-century music. In this presentation Zagar and Piaček did not unpack all of their allusions, thus still reserving some humorous performativity for those familiar with Slovakia’s history and culture. They alluded to the trilingual history of Bratislava and the transliteration in their group’s name but they did not explain the anachronistic feel and present-day politics of the “Požoň” term for Slovaks. Instead, they explained: “[T]he music of the group Požoň sentimentál reflects the atmosphere of Central Europe – it is clear that this part of the world is exceptionally suitable for an open, polystylistic approach to music, since it has always been a significant crossroads of various cultural spheres” (Zagar and Piaček 1998:230). Piaček and Zagar explained that “[t]he group’s aim is to contribute… to the revival or re-revival of the region and city’s cultural consciousness – to co-create regional and city culture” (1998:230). For this purpose, they stated that neither the post-Darmstadt complexity and intellectualism of the region’s classical music nor the reaction to it with such idioms as minimalism is sufficient. Thus for PS it is Gebrauchsmusik that will perform the city’s and the region’s restoration: “[i]t is not only music anymore that is the aim of the group’s reflective activities (reflektívnej aktivity)– one could actually say that music is taking on the status of something one simply uses every day as a matter of course” (1998:230). Zagar and Piaček explained that for this reason they are a café orchestra as well as a new-music ensemble. They intend to “return to the basic function of music: to enable a direct experience from the perception of music not mediated by an intellectual construction” (1998:230). This concept makes it necessary for the group deliberately and carefully to “loosen the existing aesthetic boundaries and blur the borders between so-called artificial and so-called popular music, between the individual genres of art…or between art and everyday life. Art for Požoň sentimentál represents a space in which something ‘bad’, banal, meaningless (for example kitsch) can be recast into something positive, ‘good’, into something meaningful” (1998:231).
The album Požoň Sentimentál: Venované Hansimu (Požoň Sentimentál: Dedicated to “Hansi”) illustrates many ways in which the group applied its aesthetic during its first several years. The cover of the CD jacket is a color illustration in the late 19th-century Jugendstil manner; it shows two children in middle-class garb dragging a mouse tied to a piece of string across the floor. Four cats are watching and also playing with the mouse. The back cover features an additional closeup of the injured mouse. The jacket includes an excerpt from Bondy’s novel Epizóda ’96 and an essay by Piaček’s father. In his excerpt, Bondy reflects, “this town was always marginal, a stop between other truly large and grandiose towns.” On the city’s new working class, Bondy muses: “it often seems to me that the town didn’t give them the warmest of welcomes…they were only given shelter in homes constructed all too hastily, in concrete blocks of flats…and yet, when I look at these parts of my town, I clearly feel the unique spirit emanating from the soil and enchanting my town….I’d speak of the diminishing scent of the relics that an ancient community of four ethnic groups (etnik) left behind.” A short essay entitled “Požonizmus” (Požonism) is by Piaček’s father Jozef, a philosopher. Although Jozef Piaček did coin the term “Požonism,” rather than explicating the aesthetic, he describes a process of change and modernization that the group’s musical actions embody. With a metaphor of youth familiar from the poetry of Heinrich Heine and specific to the region, he states that change is like a divine apeiron or a spring wind (the Alpine Föhn). Nothing can prevent it from coming through the country. Written at a point of struggle against Mečiar and the SNS, this metaphor implies that it is impossible for old institutions to stay the same. Thus listeners want to laugh, but they also feel “disquieting nostalgia.”
The repertoire on the album comes from nineteenth-century composers, Slovak composers of the parent generation to PS, the Ps members, and their peers. The composers of the parent generation include Ilja Zeljenka and Vladimír Bokes. Bokes normally wrote in an extremely complex serial style; for PS, however, he arranged a piece that he had composed at age 13. The album includes pieces by two peers of the PS members: Martin Čorej, a composer for film and stage productions including pieces for the two major folklore groups SĽUK and Lúčnica; and Peter Machajdík, a self-taught composer who normally created electronic dance and improvised music. All four of the PS members contributed pieces for this CD (although Lenko is known almost exclusively as a performer). Whether the pieces are actually from the fin de siecle or newly composed, the titles of many of the pieces on this first album express paradoxes. Lauko’s piece Buffo. Na šarišskym zámku (Buffo. On the šariš Castle) is contradictory in that a comic buffo dance might occur in a 19th century Parisian dance hall, but not on the šariš Castle hilltop, which was a set of ruins already in the seventeenth century. Zeljenka’s Posedenie v Daxe (Sitting around in the Dax/ Cup of Coffee in Dax) refers to a popular coffee house and hotel that had been owned by the Dax family of Pressburg vintners. It was not possible to linger in the Dax because the Communist government had first nationalized it to make a worker’s pub and then demolished it in the mid-1970s to widen a street.
All of the music on the CD shares some basic characteristics. The album is purely instrumental. All of the pieces are written for the flute-violin-accordion-piano combination. Some pieces include additional instruments such as clarinet or cello, although Piaček comments that this configuration was just for formal concerts and the recording;. All of the pieces are sectional with 8-16 bar phrases and occasional introductions, phrase extensions, or codettas. The pieces are tonal and use diatonic harmony with occasional modulations; C major and A minor predominate as keys. They are in quadratic or triple meter with some syncopation and some brief rubato passages. These meters are rendered in standard light-music rhythms of the region, including waltz, habanera, march, polka, and Ländler. Although the titles contain specific images, they go beyond character pieces to evoke genres such as incidental music, Alpine music, tango, children’s songs, or salon piano. The newly-composed pieces on the album and especially pieces composed by the four members of the group include composerly touches that show the authors not just evoking Central Europe and/or Pressburg, but also making ironic commentary upon it. Thus codas, phrase extensions, contrapuntal devices, and cadenzas are all miniaturized. The instruments take unexpected roles. There is syncopation. Modernist elements appear, including bitonality, angular leaps, and melodies constructed from non-chord tones or modal idioms. The music includes aspects of contemporaryAnglo-American classical music such as minimalism or rock rhythms.
Pieces by Boris Lenko and Ľubo Burgr play on class aspirations. V sobotu popoludní (Saturday Afternoon), Lenko’s single composition for the CD, together with Čorej’s contribution, juxtaposes modernist elements with tropes of salon piano such as chromatic runs, glissandi, and cadenzas (see Citron 1988). The piece begins with a set of lyrical phrases in C minor that end in an exchange of staccato accents between piano and accordion. The theme is repeated with violin and flute adding countermelodies and chromatic runs. The next section of the piece, at a much faster tempo, is in G major with several digressions to unexpected keys. The piano plays a melody that consists of a downward broken chord, upward chromatic runs, and short runs splashed in the upper range of the instrument. A very brief violin cadenza follows with glissandi and unexpectedly wide intervals, including tritones and major sevenths. The cadenza segues into a triple-meter melody over a piano vamp on D major and D minor. The first section returns, this time with the piano and accordion accents at irregular intervals. Burgr’s contributions to the CD juxtapose grand drama and street theatre. One of his pieces is a dedication to the Czech actress (and first lady) Dáša Veškrnová and two other women. The first section in C major has style elements associated with Romantic period opera. Flute plays a legato melody low in its range, accompanied by piano chords. The section repeats with flute and accordion playing the melody in parallel sixths; the flute adds trills reminiscent of Carl Maria von Weber’s writing for that instrument. A diminished triad on F, followed by a brief violin cadenza, finishes on Bb. The second section evokes barrel-organ music in a polytonal fashion. Piano and accordion play short riffs in Bb major. Flute and piano interject trills not in the key. The instruments go haltingly up a chromatic scale and then return to the short riffs and trills, this time playing them loudly and in a romping manner. The accordion adds riffs around a tonal center of C. The piece ends with two loud C chords.
Bohatá a štastná z Engerau (Rich and Happy Lady from Engerau), by Piaček, shows minimalist and popular music elements that he was to expand in future compositions. Piaček commented that, since Petržalka was erected on Engerau, the area had been a feudal estate, so it was and is not possible to be rich or happy there (2007b). The piece illustrates Piaček experimenting with what could be the smallest amount of local reference. The initial section of the piece, in A major, features a promenade-style melody that repeats an upward pentachord culminating in a held note. The accompaniment, by piano and guitar with stopped strings, is a syncopated alternation between the first and fifth degrees of the tonic chord with syncopated chord tones in the piano’s upper hand; the key, motives, and rhythmic sense of the section recall Vince Guaraldi’s Linus and Lucy. The next section, in C major and then B minor, switches to a habanera rhythm. Violin, flute, and accordion play a melody line in unison consisting of an upward aeolian hexachord. This section satirizes a trite (but also minimalist) way to play the tango, with the pianist playing exactly the same staccato accent on the third beat of each measure. With the shift to B minor, the pianist adds another minimalist element above the habanera rhythm by alternating pitches a third apart, as the violin, flute and accordion play dotted rhythms in an ascending scale; the unison texture and held note of the dotted rhythm miniaturize the massiveness that the repetition creates. In the next section, the piano divides the measure into two syncopated parts for a bass line while playing short syncopated motives above it. With held notes (ending in turns for the violin), the ensemble modulates through an array of keys to Ab. They then play two beats of ragtime to modulate and return to the initial promenade-style section. The instrumentation, highly sectional nature, dotted rhythms, and tango and habanera elements of this piece may mark it as “Central European“ and give it specific reference to Slovak tango, whereas the other elements link it to Anglo-American experimental classical music.
Zagar’s pieces contrast just a few stylistic elements such as contour or articulation, enabling an audience untrained in classical music to perceive their oddness. These style elements create a hallucinatory impression in Čakal som T’a v Carltone (I Waited for You at the Carlton). The Carlton is the coffee house of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Located in the center of the old town, the hotel was closed for renovation throughout the 1990s; thus there could be neither coffee nor waiting nor even a coffee shop at that time. Zagar reflected that after it reopened, the coffee house prices were so steep that Slovaks still would not have been able to rendezvous there (2007). Zagar’s piece parallels the Carlton’s appearance in Epizóda ’96, where one night the protagonist tries and fails to meet someone in front of the hotel’s rusty and weed-choked construction gate. In ABC form, Zagar’s piece begins bitonally. The pianist repeats a Db major chord. This chord has octave doublings and is densely voiced. Over these chords, flute and accordion play a manically-paced triplet melody of arpeggios and alternating seconds. All instruments then shift to A minor for a transition passage that is slow and sustained; flute and violin play a melody line with some stepwise movement adding emotion, and piano arpeggiates accompanying chords. The next section is a short slow waltz with a lyrical melody in A major. The flute follows the violin melody in parallel thirds, adding to a nostalgic atmosphere with this device of Romantic-period opera. All instruments then shift back to quadruple meter for a slow csárdás whose melody is marked with many short-long rhythms. Rather than evoking cafe music in a ghostly fashion, the csárdás is bombastic. Accordion and piano provide an accented portato accompaniment. Staccato cadence notes repeated at the octave simplify and exaggerate a verbunkos cadence pattern of several accented notes found in many styles of Hungarian music. Zagar’s piece ends grandly, with the musicians playing each note of an A major chord in unison tremolo. This rendering resembles the way that PS plays the excerpt from Striczl’s Ungarischen Magnaten Marsch slowly, with heavy accents, and doubled at the octave. Both pieces may spoof the upright torso, marcato gestures, and heavily accented portato of Hungarian dance genres.
The graphics, prose, and musical numbers of Požoň Sentimentál: Venované Hansimu convey some of the group’s balance between Gebrauchsmusik and high classical music. Lengthy, complex, or dissonant pieces are not included. The album does not reference every musical dimension of old Pressburg; it does not play on Catholic church music, other choral music, or Jewish cantorial singing. The ensemble’s Lydian-mode excursion is not on this album. All of the pieces on the album do juxtapose past, present, reality, fantasy, locality, and ethnicity. Massiveness in minature conveys the Požoňist and old-Pressburg ethos. It is encompassed in the salon piano idiom and the piece titles from the fin de siecle, and it is conveyed in the new compositions through Romantic opera voicing, tiny cadenzas, stereotyped local rhythms, exaggerated accents, polytonality, or minimalism.

Provocations

PS’s genre blurring provoked controversy. While some constituencies enjoyed the group’s performances, other performers and writers objected to both the class and the ethnic aspects of PS’s portrayals. These interpretations vary according to three major types of audiences that Piaček delineates. PS’s classical music audience included listeners, composers, and music critics within Slovakia who had expectations very similar to those of the other Central European countries (see Šťastný 2007b). The patrons of the Prašná Bašta restaurant, who are predominantly Slovaks but who include a few summer tourists, comprise another audience. A third type of audience is the Stoka constituency of university students and older avant-gardists. In comparing the three types of audiences, Piaček reflected that PS’s approach fits best with the expectations of a theatre public.

The context when we play Požoň music in contemporary music festivals is very curious and very funny, for us to play there, because the people don’t expect such things.. a little bit [of] problem is with the middle Europe because the German speaking audience, Austrians and Germans, they have a … very complicated serial post-Darmstadt music, so Požoň is completely different and they don’t understand why we do such things. So the audience in concert halls-- they take [the] music as a controversial music…Then the second audience is this Prašná Bašta, the people don’t listen actually, or they listen, but it’s a kind of background music for them which also makes sense for the new context of Požoň music and for the culture and space of the people there sitting in Prašná Bašta…And the third and I think the best audience is in theatres. Everybody in theatres, they come to the concert, and they listen to Požoň Sentimentál’s music actually, because they are interested, but they don’t expect a virtuoso to play…the correct tune… [i]n theatres the people are more open and they enjoy the atmosphere. (2007a)

In the group’s experience, the classical contemporary music audience of the region is the least inclined to understand, and the most likely to be made uncomfortable by, the Požonism aesthetic. Just one of the audiences, restaurant patrons, fits with the Gebrauchsmusik dimension; Piaček alludes to the Požonist idea of music constituting place in the restaurant microcosm (including the natural acoustics of the stone city fortifications backing the Prašná Bašta courtyard). Theatre audiences are ready to have the group create an “atmosphere” and are open to the way that PS wants to satirize classical music as it might have been played at fin de siècle by ordinary citizens.
Between 1997 and 2002, PS staged five concerts at the Stoka theatre space in which they collaborated with distinguished classical music soloists. Borrowing the language of established arts institutions, the concerts were titled a “subscription” (abonentný) series. PS recruited as its regular guest Marian Lapšanský, a Slovak pianist of the parent generation who had won many prizes, concertized internationally, and at the time taught at VŠMU, and the series was titled “Lapšanský at STOKA.” Additional guests on different concerts, all with distinguished international careers, included a cellist, opera singers, and even the noted Chopin interpreter Eugen Indjic PS gained funding for these concerts from the national Music Fund (Hudobný Fond), with “the idea to bring classical (važnu, serious) music and its interpreters to a young audience (mladému obecenstvu) that has not yet found its way to concert halls“ (“Čo šecko” 1999). Analogously to Blaho Uhlár’s view of the Slovak National Theatre, Piaček intended concerts as a critique of the dominant institutions. When the Slovak Philharmonic programmed Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, in its concert hall just a short distance from the Stoka premises, PS, Indjic, and Lapšanský played an arrangement of the same piece the next night (2007b). For the Poulenc concerto and all other concerts, PS used upright pianos. The programs included pieces from the classical music canon; pieces by minor composers of the late nineteenth century; arrangements of pop music; and some original compositions. The Indjic concert included, in addition to the Poulenc, Chopin pieces for solo piano; short pieces by the 19th-century Czech composer Zdeňek Fibich; and several of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances for four-hand piano. The PS ensemble played arrangements of pop songs; miniatures by Piaček compressing classical standards (such as “E lucevan le stelle”) into minimalist syncopations, arpeggios and interval repetitions; and Eurovision Tune, a one-minute overture in Handelian style but with heavy accents.
Publicity of the time asserts that the audience for the series, comprised largely of young Stoka patrons, was extremely enthusiastic (“Čo šecko” 1999). Lapšanský’s presence and the unusual experimental-theatre setting was significant enough to observers of classical music that two writers reviewed the first concert of the series for the major chronicle of Slovak music, Hudobný život (Musical Life). It also was the source of their outrage. Meška Puškášová, a frequent contributor to Hudobný život, reported that the “concert atmosphere promised to be reminiscent of a relaxed little happening” and acknowledged that the ensemble was a type of “eccentric joke” (recesia) but she objected to the use of the upright piano. She criticized a lack of originality by stating that the group had made “faxed transcriptions” of music by major composers, and concluded that the “concert…naturally had a sensational tone” (Puškášová 1998:2). Tomáš Horkay, a pianist, musicologist, music reviewer, teacher and member of the ethnic Hungarian minority, praised Lapšanský’s performance of Fibich pieces as a “reminder of Art” (spomienka na Umenie). He complimented PS for its arrangement of one of the most important symbols of Hungarian patriotism, the aria “Hazám, hazám,” from Ferenc Erkel’s opera Bánk Bán, stating that the “ensemble has undoubtedly made a contribution to the cosmopolitanization of social consciousness and ridicule of nationalism.” Horkay conceded that the theatre was filled to capacity and that audience, comprised mostly of University students, did listen “seriously and attentively” to the Fibich pieces. But he proposed that the PS group had only staged a concert with these eminent composers for commercial reasons. He objected to Ilja Zeljenka’s participation as a drummer to accompany Lapšanský for an arrangement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto (on Stoka’s upright piano), stating that the arrangement was a “process of flogging Grieg…The work definitely does not deserve the cruel punishment of being performed as a parody.” He objected, “Not everything can be the subject of shameless ridicule. There is a limit, beyond which it becomes appropriate to use expressive words such as desecrate, violate, etc.” Horkay suggested that the best place for the PS group to perform its critiques of classical music is not the Stoka theatre, but in cafés since there they could “not try to pass themselves off as serious artists.”
With his use of the term “Art,” Horkay conveys that he thinks of classical music as a high enterprise that should be protected from parody or arrangement. He interprets PS’s experiments with mixing the pretentious and the classical as “tasteless,” although he accepts their spoofing of aggressive nationalism (Horkay 1998). Both reviewers believe that PS’s introduction of marketing techniques such as featuring celebrity guests or event pricing detract from the power of classical music to elevate and educate. Yet these negative reviews of the first concert did not affect PS’s youth audience, alternative cultural capital, and entrepreneurialism. It indicates that institutional conservatism was becoming slightly less influential at this point, since the Mečiar government was on the wane and about to leave power. The theatre audience’s response was positive enough, Piaček’s communications with older classical musicians persuasive enough, and his and Zagar’s ability strong enough to communicate the value of their idea to the Music Fund that PS was able to stage five such concerts. However, inviting guests meant that PS gave up control. In Piaček’s view, straightforward playing gave the most humorous nuance; Indjic’s serious interpretation of a Chopin mazurka on upright piano was very effective, whereas the emphasis on classical music clichés always ran the risk of making the humor too and ultimately put an end to the series (2007b).
Požoň Sentimentál returned to the theme of old Pressburg for several foreign engagements in the 2000s. The response of one non-local audience excavated a tension that is latent in this theme: what constitutes a valid restoration of Jewish culture? In 2004 PS was invited to play at the Strasbourg “Les nuits Européenes” festival. This event, then in its ninth year, billed itself as one that “welcomes Europe's cultural diversity”; its focus that year was “the current music of Central Europe.” Thirteen bands from six countries (although, unusually for a festival of this time, no Romani groups) performed over three nights, primarily at Le Maillon, a venue for contemporary theatre and performing arts. Each act was billed with a different genre (varying from “ethno ambient” to “Bohemian fado”). The program advised that the genre mix meant “roots assumed and modernity affirmed,” and it included two “atypical chamber orchestras” that blended art music with other genres—the Austrian/Turkish/Czech group Metamorphosis, and Požoň Sentimentál. PS opened one concert, followed on the bill by the Pressburger Klezmer Band and the Slovenian group Terrafolk. The theme of the evening was music “called ‘traditional’; denying the folklorist approach in terms of the third millennium, it reveals instead a Mitteleuropa aware of its cosmopolitan roots, open to the world and modernity.” The program’s description of PS stressed its theatrical connections and alluded to its provocations: “[C]reated by a handful of cultural agitators of Bratislava, this atypical chamber orchestra revives the cosmopolitan world of Mitteleuropa, through a series of musical pieces and sound tableaux evoking silent film or cabaret.” The Pressburger Klezmer Band, according to the program, “introduces us to Jewish culture in Bratislava…in its inclusion in modernity” and is “[a]ble to restore the oldest Yiddish songs in original contemporary orchestrations.”
Michal Havran, a writer for the Bratislava daily SME, reviewed the occasion. He observed wryly that PS delivered to the French audience exactly what they expect from central Europeans – “that musicians are musically educated, cynically humorous, able to conceptualize in a modern way and can’t stand snobbiness.” He commented on Burgr’s fluid (bell époque) French, and reported on the band’s mixture of pieces; he noted that the audience members did not understand the ironic tone of many of the original compositions. Turning to the Pressburger Klezmer Band, Havran complained that “mystic hits from the Balkans and Ukrainian shtetls were too often intermixed with stilted experiments that have nothing to do with klezmer.” He quoted one Jewish audience member as explaining that the scheduling of the concert on a Saturday night had been problematic, and then praising PS for how “the violin was so really Jewishly sad.’” Indeed, as I observed them in the mid-2000s, the sound and stage presentation of the Pressburger Klezmer Band (herafter PKB) does differ from PS. The PKB plays many well-known Israeli and East European songs and dances and in the mid-2000s included rock music elements. The group sings fluidly in both Hebrew and Yiddish. The band’s lineup includes, in addition to drum set and synthesizer, instruments like violin, clarinet, and accordion that are symbolic of the East European shtetl. The members wear simple caps and jackets evoking a modest rural life. They sing in a bel canto tone with Western art-music intonation and use just a few ornaments associated with liturgical or other sacred cantillation.Havran’s review, ostensibly reporting West Europeans’ responses to the two portrayals of Bratislava and the central Europe region, exposed a conflict over how Jewish culture should be restored in Bratislava. In SME’s electronic reader’s forum, members of the PKB objected strongly that Havran did not understand modern experiments with klezmer, and they discussed his allusion to Jewish religious practice. The band members commented that klezmer, as a secular music, was not subject to religious strictures, but that it was also correct for the PKB to perform on the Saturday evening concert, since the Jewish Sabbath had ended.
This conflict exposed local dimensions of the way in which Jewish musical culture(s) now exist in Europe. Several writers have noted that “klezmer” signifies an extraordinarily wide range of musical expressions and understandings at the millennium. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that “today’s klezmer music…is in fact the result of an experience of rupture.” Extending Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling,” she states that in the U.S. what seemed to be a musical gap in the mid-twentieth century prior to the klezmer revival was actually “a plenum of shifting sensibilities.” This domain encompasses many “fault lines” (1998:50). The idea that klezmer expressions are now “sounds of sensibility” extends to Europe, but with the aftereffects of genocide and a felt imperative to repair much more pronounced. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Ruth Gruber observe that prior to the international concertizing of U.S. klezmer groups, Europeans filled the emptied “Jewish space” by associating klezmer with “Romantic mysticism” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:71-72, Gruber 2002:200-234). Mark Slobin includes many observations on Central Europe in his analysis of patterns in the creation and reception of klezmer. Slobin comments that Jewish nationality within Europe does not make sense to the majority population and everyday memory of Jewish culture is now lacking, and he objects that as a result klezmer audiences in Central Europe need “user-friendly and sentimentalized formulations of group recognition” (2000:23). Klezmer links audiences with “the lost Jew of the past” rather than with present-day conflicts (2000:26). Musicians can finesse the stark reality of genocide and its aftereffects by providing a “cathartic” experience that spans generation and class (2000:56-60).
The responses to the Strasbourg performance illustrate that Požoň Sentimentál and the PKB occupy different parts of a “Jewish” sensibility, and that these function as separate islands of memory. PS was a receptacle for the Romantic, universalist understanding of klezmer that became prominent in Germany and Western Europe through the influence of clarinetist Giora Feidman. Feidman asserts that it is feeling and emotionality, not an ethnographic basis or the musician’s ancestry, that qualifies music as authentically klezmer (Kirshenblatt Gimblett 1998:64, 71-72; see also Gruber 2002:210-213). Burgr’s violin, as heard in the modes, rubato, pitch glides, and solo voicing of the mini-cadenzas in the PS pieces, coincides with this idea. In addition, one Bratislava aficionado of alternative theatre and music asserted to me that everything PS plays is actually klezmer music. Here he reflects a local knowledge that at the fin de siècle, Jews were major patrons of and participants in the coffeehouse and salon life of Pressburg. His use of the word “everything” shows a retroactive Jewish classification as well as how assimilation had diffused Jewishness through the bourgeois parts of the city until 1938.
The Pressburger Klezmer Band brings out several other sensibilities. Invited to Bratislava and other Slovak city festivals, part of the musical lineup at corporate events, and playing for Jewish heritage tours, it is an integral part of the modern civic identity in a way that Požoň Sentimentál as an alternative and new-music group is not. Yet klezmer was not historically a part of old Pressburg. Since an urban and 19th-century Jewish musical constituency no longer exists in Bratislava, PKB has a large option of signifiers from which to fill the “Jewish space.” The band’s steady beat, bel canto tone, Israeli dances, and line dances primarily of the northeastern Jewish Pale of settlement thus have the freedom to index the “local working band” and contemporary Jewish life-cycle music more common to the U.S. than to Europe (Slobin 2000:38-39, 94; see Feldman 1994). The necessity of the PKB to make sure that its performance conforms to Jewish religious practice brings in a second way besides sensibility to fill in the empty Jewish space: reintroducing Jewish law (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:54, Soloveitchik 1994). This particular influence is part of Bratislava’s public culture through the very friendly presence of the Lubavitscher representative Rabbi Baruch Myers, through popular and educational publications describing pre-War observant Jewish life, and through the stream of Orthodox pilgrims who come to pray at Rabbi Sofer’s tomb.
Piaček reported to me that the SME review and responses had an effect. As a mark of respect for Jewish culture, PS has avoided playing any music marked specifically Jewish. This reticence only extended to PS as an ensemble. In their capacity as members of VENI and with Rabbi Myers, the PS members have performed new music at the synagogue in the settlement of Šamorín just next to Bratislava; Zagar has set three Jewish songs. PS’s strategy thus follows the means for reducing conflict outlined by Rogers Brubaker, in which the actor “undercommunicates” ethnic difference (Brubaker et al. 2006:222, 307-09). In Bratislava, the motivation of avoiding ethnic conflict affects the particular ways that heritage culture or city nostalgia will include Jewishness. Part of the way that the city has acknowledged the Holocaust and honored the memory of its victims has been to consider ways in which Jewish communities were strong and unique, whether that is by building a monument to Moses Sofer and making it accessible to pilgrims (and other tourists), by recording the oral history of Holocaust survivors, or by embracing the modernized image of the East European klezmer. The possible Jewishness in the café and fin de siècle music of Pressburg is diffuse and undefined. By trying to keep it that way in its postmodern interpretations, Požoň Sentimentál could evoke the interethnic peace that is a lynchpin of Pressburg nostalgia.
Some of PS’s representations have the power of the marginocentric image that Cornis-Pope and Neubauer suggest. They performed uncivilized nature underneath high culture and they stimulated local exchange. PS’s humorous yet serious introductions of small-mindedness into the classical canon challenged the high culture that was extremely valuable during the Communist period and the Mečiar era for connecting the East European capitals to the West. Some critics saw PS’s Lapšanský series as too commercial; the PS members (and fellow artists in the Stoka circle) believed that they were striking a new direction. One aspect of the multiethnicity of PS’s music, its perceived Jewishness, started a debate that PS found best to avoid and it points to the dynamism of reparative nostalgia. The PS members (and the Pressburger Klezmer Band) choose not to engage in the style of postmodernist critique that Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick calls “paranoid” for how it single-mindedly focuses on exposing negative roots (2003:123-51). Their subsequent actions are instead a type of “reparative” reading, one that will humorously celebrate excess, one that is “additive and accretive,” one that “wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object,” renewing the beloved classical and heritage musics of the region out of old and new bits and pieces (Sedgwick 2003:149-50)

Conclusion

The aesthetic, the sound, the provocations, and the Pressburg imaginary of PS marked just one part and one beginning of innovations that PS members made to Slovak arts and music. They collaborated with Egon Bondy and made more original compositions including large-scale and vocal works.
Urban Songs was a cycle that Piaček composed together with Bondy. Renáta Beličová notes that Bondy was fond of the folklore of the urban proletariat and had developed an interest in regional culture through an antiglobalization stance (2010:62-63, 65; see also Bondy 2005). Nearly all of the songs for the cycle came from Bondy’s experience of Prague and of Central Europe. The songs evoked pub and other settings whose clients were lower on the social scale than the failed-coffeehouse patrons evoked in PS’s first album. Over the course of several evenings, Piaček recorded Bondy extemporizing rudely to pub and salon melodies, in German and Czech. Piaček composed accompaniments and instrumental interludes (with contributions by Zagar and Lenko). Beličová interprets the instrumental interludes and the songs as a dialogue between the two capital cities. She observes, “Unlike the almost tangible genius loci of Prague, the form of Piaček’s ‘Bratislava’ -authored compositions [is] the dark side side of the authentically strong coarse Prague folklore.” The cycle closes with Bondy a cappella singing a few choked obscene phrases on the motif of the graveyard, in Belicova’s view expressing his “concern about [the genius loci’s] preservation” (2010:65). Urban Songs premiered at the Stoka theatre in November 2000 as part of the Nová slovenská hudba (New Slovak Music) festival, complete with a very long post-performance lecture that Bondy delivered on political philosophy (Piaček 2007b). PS toured to the Czech Republic, Vienna, and Budapest with Bondy to perform the cycle. Yet this most successful venture of the group was temporary because in the view of the PS members, only Bondy could give an absurdist tone to the songs; he retired from performing a few years before he passed away in 2007. A second major endeavor marked both the contribution of PS to Slovak contemporary classical music, and the divergence of PS members into different paths of this scene. Burgr, Piaček, Daniel Matej, and Martin Burlas (a pioneer of electronic music in Slovakia) wrote chamber operas. Their operas, staged at Stoka over three evenings, comprised the major part of 2001’s Evenings of New Music festival (Serečinová 2002).
All four of PS’s musicians remain devoted to Bratislava and Slovak musical life. In this they represent a notable exception to the tendency of young East European intellectuals and artists to move to West European cities and academic institutions. The group members have now entered, changed, gained support from, and/or strengthened the alternatives to established arts institutions in the country. With the Association for Contemporary Opera, Burgr launched a new theatre troupe, SkRAT, which he has led since then. SkRAT stages several new plays every season in a state-owned building in the Old Town, although the troupe frequently copes with the possibility that it will lose its performance space. Lenko continues to perform and record classical music of all periods, folk music, and tango; he teaches at the VŠMU. Piaček has written film and dance music, created electronic music, now holds a teaching post at the University of Žilina, and works at the Slovak Philharmonic on its digital and multimedia broadcast initiative. Zagar works at the Slovak Music Information Centre and has continued composing classical music. Zagar’s views illustrate that the power of the Požonist aesthetic lay in its contingency. He explained that some of his pieces for PS really served as a one-time objection to the musical status quo; his primary creative interest as of the mid-2000s was nearly opposite in that he was experimenting with large classical music principles of form and structure (Zagar 2007). PS continued to play occasionally at the Prašná Bašta through the 2000s, and produced several additional recordings, most recently Minimál (2010). The group’s humorous provocations were powerful enough that it was not necessary to repeat them or program them regularly in prominent classical music locales. Their plays on a past ethnic harmony also had to be temporary; Pressburg has permanently become Bratislava.

Discography

Ali ibn Rachid. 1992. Zoon Records TLIS 004. LP/CD.
Piaček, Marek, et al. Urban Songs. 2001. HF Music Fund Bratislava. SF 002312131
Požoň Sentimentál. 2010. Minimál. Azyl Records.
_____. Požoň Sentimentál: Venované Hansimu. 1998. HF Music Fund Bratislava SF 00252131.
Rodný môj kraj - Zem slovenská 1996.Antológia slovenskej populárnej hudby 2.

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Kľúčové slová: Egon Bondy, hudobné projekty, Urban Songs, opera Posledný let, totálny realizmus, Požoň sentimentál, Marek Piaček

Abstrakt. Odchod Egona Bondyho z Čiech do Bratislavy môže byť vnímaný ako politický exil, no jeho tvorba vrátane hudobných projektov svedčí o tom, že išlo len o ďalší prejav jeho celoživotného pocitu permanentnej cudzosti vo svete a nezakontextovanosti v živote. S tvorbou Bondyho sa spája poetika totálneho realizmu, vyjadrovaná jazykovými prostriedkami irónie, cynizmu a nezainteresovanosti. Jeho neskoré prózy, tak ako texty k hudobným projektom, na ktorých pracoval v Bratislave, sú však v skutočnosti odlišné. Sú presýtené etickými apelmi a jednoznačnými hodnotiacimi postojmi. Takýto poetický výraz nezodpovedá totálnemu realizmu, práve naopak, možno ho považovať za jeho negáciu.

Uvažovať o Bondyho tvorivých aktivitách v oblasti hudby z aspektov typických skôr pre literárnu vedu je nezvyčajné. Predsa len – Bondy je v prvom rade filozof a literát, takže jeho hudobné aktivity, či už pražské, alebo bratislavské, môžu byť vnímané skôr ako pridaná hodnota či len biografická zaujímavosť. No i pridaná hodnota je vždy integrálnou súčasťou literárnej a filozofickej tvorby autora, nech už je považovaná za margináliu či len doklad všestrannosti undergroundového umelca.

Tvorivá poetika Egona Bondyho, poetika totálneho realizmu je synonymom pre výraz cynického a odosobneného bytia. Bytia, akoby nezainteresovane pozorovaného prenikavým vnútorným pohľadom, no paradoxne – z vtáčej perspektívy. Odosobnenosť a citová nezainteresovanosť logicky predpokladá pocit stability, pocit, ktorý túto nezainteresovanosť na umelecky reflektovanom priebehu bytia umožňuje. Totálny realizmus je totálny zrejme preto, že v ňom nie sú prítomné idealistické prvky v podobe očakávania, zdôvodňovania, ospravedlňovania, či iných ideovo determinovaných predpokladov osobného interesu na zabezpečení istej kvality „bytovania“. Práve takto môže byť interpretovaná poézia Egona Bondyho.

Pohľad na Bondyho neskoršie prozaické dielo ponúka síce podobný obraz vrhnutosti do bytia a nemožnosti, ba zbytočnosti osobnej angažovanosti na vlastnom osude, no existenciálna situácia tvorivého subjektu v týchto textoch rozhodne nepôsobí stabilne. Akákoľvek interpretácia totálneho realizmu Egona Bondyho by teda mala zahrnúť i jeho vyústenie do poetiky posledných prozaických textov a spolu s nimi i jeho hudobných projektov. Nezakontextovanosť človeka v bytí (nespočetnekrát deklarovaná nielen v literárnych, ale i vo filozofických textoch Bondyho) má totiž v porovnaní s vnímaním totálneho realizmu celkom odlišné existenciálne i tvorivé konzekvencie, rozhodne nimi nie sú cynizmus či odosobnenosť, ale práve naopak.

Pri interpretácii umeleckých textov nie je spoľahlivé predpokladať, že autorova existenciálna situácia bude vždy jasne a jednoznačne prítomná v jeho diele. Interpretačne korektnejšie je interpretovať umelecké texty z pozície čitateľa a „čítať“ ich spôsobom, ktorý sa čitateľovi prirodzene ponúka. V tomto prípade nie je čitateľom literárny vedec, ale muzikológ, a to samozrejme predurčuje nielen čitateľské predpoklady, ale i spôsob „čítania“. Tým viac, že „čítané“ sú hudobné projekty Bondyho, teda také literárne texty, ktoré sú neoddeliteľnou súčasťou hudobných textov.

V umeleckej tvorbe Egona Bondyho sa motív odcudzenia viaže na diskrétne pociťovanie trýznivého duševného stavu, akéhosi žitia „bez domova“, zvláštneho duchovného „vyhnanstva“, „vylúčenia“, osobnej a dobrovoľnej, nezriedka pozérsky a občas až masochisticky deklarovanej „auto-exkomunikácie“. Viaceré námety Bondyho posledných románov sú výrazom práve takéhoto duševného stavu: Severin – dobrovoľný vyhnanec udomácnený nielen v cudzej krajine, ale doslova v cudzom svete, Hatto – dobrovoľne odchádzajúci z vlasti; vzhľadom na bytostnú nezakontextovanosť autora – hrdinu až spisná novela, spoveď dobrovoľného vyhnanca vedomého si univerzálnosti a útrpnej mnohorozmernosti jeho duševnej trýzne. V textoch Egona Bondyho možno pocit nezakontextovanosti vnímať nielen ako dôsledok fyzického odchodu z domova, ale ako duševný pocit „cudzosti a nepríslušnosti“. Zároveň ich možno chápať aj ako výraz bolestnej životnej reality podmieňujúcej psychické prežívanie poslednej – bratislavskej – životnej etapy Bondyho. Nakoľko bol jeho pocit ohrozenia osobnej slobody objektívny aj na konci jeho života, nie je dôležité. Nie je dôležité, či bola jeho „paranoja“ opodstatnená. Stačí, že Bondy tento pocit mal a pocit bol natoľko silný, že ho primäl odísť, opustiť nielen komunitu, ale i domov a usadiť sa v Bratislave. Jeho bratislavská životná etapa rozhodne nebola „exilom“, nebola triviálne motivovaná banálnou nádejou na lepšiu, príjemnejšiu existenciu. Pre Bondyho to nebola ani faktická, ani duchovne fatálna emigrácia. Ako to cítil a ako tomu má rozumieť i jeho čitateľ, naznačil celkom jasne nielen poetickými, ale i explicitne jazykovými prostriedkami. Bratislavu vnímal ako svoj domov (presne v trpiteľských intenciách vlastnej deklarovanej nezakontextovanosti – domov je všade… a nikde): „Hneď ako prekročím hranicu, pocítim zrazu čudný stav bezpečia. Som vo svojej krajine…“¹ A čitateľa nenechá na pochybách ani ďalej: „…kto sa kde narodí, rodisko si aj väčšinou zamiluje. Takže zaľúbených sú milióny. To všetko treba brať do úvahy, keď už píšem o svojom meste.“² A ešte, vôbec nie posledný raz: „No toto moje mesto má kdesi skrytého ducha…“³ Ostentatívne vyjadrovaný intímny vzťah k Bratislave, opakovanie osobného privlastňovacieho zámena, ktoré z textu vyčnieva, nenechá nikoho na pochybách. Čitateľ poznajúci kontext Bondyho života a filozofie intenzívne vníma ne-logickosť výrazu „moje mesto“, a to ho privádza k precíteniu podprahového významu tejto metafory. Status Bondyho ako prisťahovalca rozhodne nemal fyzickú povahu, bol to existenciálny status. Bondy opovrhoval „biosom“, nahliadal svoju existenciu z exilu svojho vnútorného sveta, a to predurčilo trpko fatálny spôsob jeho uvažovania – zo života nemá kam odísť a zároveň v ňom nemôže ani zostať. Nevyhnutný konflikt biosu a inteligibilna (Bondy občas volí výraz – intelektuálna), ústiaci do pocitov „nezakontextovanosti“ človeka v „tupej fakticite biosu“ sa obsedantne vynára snáď vo všetkých jeho filozofických prácach. Dôsledne logickú (až „metodologickú“) argumentáciu prirodzenosti pocitu „zúfalej prázdnoty biologického života“ možno nájsť v texte Juliiny otázky.⁴

Umelecký výraz tohto existenciálneho stavu je prítomný aj v realizáciách bratislavských hudobných projektov, na ktorých sa Bondy podstatnou mierou autorsky podieľal. Nepochybne najužšie možno nájsť väzby existenciálneho pocitu nezakontextovanosti v projekte opery Posledný let⁵ venujúcej sa životu Milana Rastislava Štefánika. No tematizácia bolestného a nepokojného vedomia nemožnosti „byť niekde naozaj bezpečne doma“ prerastá aj cynizmom hrubozrnných Urban Songs,⁶ nehovoriac o Bondyho iných kultúrnych, najmä prednáškových aktivitách v Bratislave.

Z Bondyho hudobných projektov sa môže zdať, že jeho dotyky s bratislavským hudobným životom boli značne exkluzívne, pretože tvorivo spolupracoval len s niekoľkými hudobníkmi a performermi, ktorí v oblasti hudby a divadla reprezentujú slovenskú postmodernú scénu.⁷ Bondyho „hudobné“ kontakty však boli oveľa pestrejšie. Verejne najznámejšie boli azda Bondyho „antiglobalistické“ prednášky, no pre hudobnú kultúru väčší význam mali osobné stretnutia hudobníkov v súkromí Bondyho bratislavského bytu. Povestnými sa stali tzv. piatky o 15.00 u Bondyho, najskôr v jeho byte v centre Bratislavy, neskôr, keď sa Bondy presťahoval na sídlisko Dlhé diely, sa stretnutia preniesli do Hudobného centra.⁸ Boli to spoločné chvíle venované počúvaniu hudby a následným diskusiám, ktoré okrem Egona Bondyho viedli aj ním vybraní hudobníci.⁹ Ako prvý to bol skladateľ a teoretik Juraj Beneš, po ňom skladateľ a tiež teoretik Daniel Matej, neskôr Bondy oslovil skladateľa Marka Piačeka. Z hudobných teoretikov udržoval Egon Bondy bližšie kontakty napr. aj s Ingeborg Šiškovou. Hudbu pre „piatky u Bondyho“ vyberal Bondy a tí, ktorí stretnutia viedli, a potom sa o nej dlho rozprávalo a diskutovalo. Bondy pracoval s hudbou zásadne nesystematicky, no vždy išlo o zaujímavú a v tej dobe málo známu hudbu, napr. gruzínske chorály, skladby Philipa Glassa, či zdanlivo banálne, hudobne však zaujímavé populárne operné árie v podaní talianskych „dychoviek“.¹⁰

Egon Bondy okrem toho navštevoval koncerty najsúčasnejších hudobných zoskupení ako Veni Ensemble, či neskôr Vapori del cuore alebo Požoň sentimentál (posledné dva menované súbory založili členovia „materského“ Veni Ensemble). Sledoval ich aktivity a chodil aj na všetky podujatia v rámci festivalov venovaných novej hudbe, ako boli Večery novej hudby¹¹ alebo Melos-Étos.¹² Podľa slov samotných hudobníkov bol Bondy v hľadisku nie raz jediným zástupcom nielen svojej, ale vôbec staršej generácie bratislavských poslucháčov. A ako to už u Bondyho bolo zvykom, jeho účasť na koncertoch nespočívala len v ich vypočutí, ale najmä v následných dlhých rozhovoroch s muzikantmi o hudbe, o tvorbe a napokon vlastne o kultúre a súčasnosti. Mladí umelci zažívali zvláštne chvíle, keď si uvedomili, že Egon Bondy, o dve generácie starší od nich, im vlastne rozumie a premýšľa tak ako oni a tiež o tom, o čom oni, vtedy ešte ani nie tridsaťroční: „Nikoho tie koncerty nezaujímali tak ako jeho… on sa stále pýtal, boli to intenzívne rozhovory o hudbe… jeho záujem bol nepredstieraný, ozajstný, bolo to fascinujúce, že starý človek o tri generácie od teba vzdialený má rovnaké predstavy o hudbe ako ty… bol na koncertoch stále. Mladí ľudia ani za nič nechceli provokovať a starý človek hovorí – poďme niečo robiť…“¹³

Zdá sa, že Bondy bol pre mladú hudobnú Bratislavu prinajmenšom v tomto smere – svojím intenzívnym spolužitím s mladými umelcami – veľkou inšpiráciou a podporou a nepochybne aj intenzívnou provokáciou. Nie je isté, či mal Egon Bondy nejaký výraznejší vplyv na neúnavného organizátora Večerov novej hudby a zakladateľa Veni Ensemble Daniela Mateja, no pri súbore Požoň sentimentál a tvorbe jeho lídra a zakladateľa Marka Piačeka o tom niet pochýb – výsledkom ich kontaktov sú realizácie dvoch už spomínaných hudobných projektov: Urban Songs a opery Posledný let. Hudobníci súboru Požoň sentimentál mali s Bondym spoločnú vášeň pre hudbu prirodzene korelujúcu so súčasnou divergentnou hudobnou kultúrou, obzvlášť však o synkretické, či skôr syntetické zakontextovanie tejto jej divergencie do umeleckého tvaru. Svoju hudbu umiestňujú v aktuálnom čase nielen do koncertných siení, ale najmä do bežných civilných každodenných (povedali by sme banálnych) priestorov – klubov, malých nezávislých scén a nekonformných pódií.¹⁴ Títo umelci svoje diela nielen vytvárajú, ale i produkujú a zároveň organizujú a manažujú všetky svoje umelecké produkcie spojené s divadlom, dramatickou akciou, performanciou, tancom, obrazom a samozrejme – hudbou. Neboja sa banalít – naopak, tematizujú ich, a tak sa s nimi vyrovnávajú. Je zrejmé, že v tejto charakteristike možno nájsť nemálo čŕt vlastných aj osobnosti generačne síce vzdialeného, no duchom blízkeho Egona Bondyho. „Jeho vplyv je viac, ako sa dá zdokumentovať… ten vplyv je to, ako žil… že si ho stretával s tou igelitkou, že sa stále pýtal… potom, po tých dvoch rokoch už rozprával stále len on…“¹⁵ Podľa osobných svedectiev Marka Piačeka, Bondy sa s nimi (mladými hudobníkmi) cítil dobre, páčila sa mu ich ľahkosť a inakosť, údajne často naliehavo navrhoval: „…pane Marek, musíme spolu niečo robiť!“¹⁶ Práve na takýchto stretnutiach (a tiež na dlhých prechádzkach) sa formovali prvé predstavy a koncepcie ich spoločných hudobno-umeleckých projektov.

Egon Bondy udržoval úzke kontakty s aktuálnou hudobnou kultúrou počas celého svojho života, nielen v Bratislave. Bol to teda životný postoj mladých bratislavských hudobníkov, ich prístup k tvorbe a hudobnej kultúre vôbec, ktorý sa zdal Bondymu podobný pražskej undergroundovej hudobnej scéne, i keď v ich hudobnej reči a hudobnej poetike je ťažké nájsť nejaké paralely. Možno však vytušiť isté väzby medzi umeleckým zameraním dvoch významných súborov vtedajšej, a vlastne i súčasnej hudby, pražského Agon Orchestra a bratislavského Veni Ensemble. Oba súbory, ktoré Bondy dôverne poznal, mali podobné, ak nie rovnaké umelecké ciele a ich koncerty reprezentovali dobovú alternatívnu hudobnú kultúru prostredníctvom experimentálnej hudby.

Oba „bondyovské“ hudobné projekty v Bratislave – Urban Songs aj Posledný let, boli hudobne realizované súborom Požoň sentimentál. Požoň sentimentál nehrá len kaviarenskú zábavnú hudbu, naopak, prevažnú väčšinu jeho repertoáru tvorí autorská hudba.¹⁷ Nadväzuje na regionálne hudobné cítenie strednej Európy, ktoré je tak trochu epigónske, nie však z núdze, ale preto, že stredoeurópsky región je jednoducho vytváraný po stáročia spleťou kultúr, etník, rozdielnych mentalít, ktoré nie vždy spolu vychádzajú v dobrom, no cítia, že patria k sebe. Základnú zostavu súboru tvorí kvarteto Ľubomír Burgr (husle), Boris Lenko (akordeón), Marek Piaček (flauta) a Peter Zagar (klavír), príležitostne je doplňaná o ďalšie hudobné nástroje.¹⁸ Český muzikológ Jaroslav Šťastný zhrnul hudbu súboru Požoň sentimentál do štyroch charakteristík, ktoré vlastne výstižne artikulujú i zrejmé dôvody, prečo si Egon Bondy hudbu Požoňu obľúbil a vyhľadával jeho spoločnosť: „1. Zdůraznění domácí, maloměstské tradice – oproti běžnému pachtění se za světovými trendy a napodobování ‚velkoměstského‘ stylu (computery, lasery, video atd.). 2. Vstřícnost k prostým posluchačům (kteří si mohou poslechnout své známé a oblíbené melodie v recyklované podobě) – oproti arogantně elitářskému přístupu ‚klasické Nové hudby‘, která s širším publikem ani nepočítá… 3. Očividná muzikantská radost ze hry, z prostého muzicírování – oproti ‚nadlidské‘ virtuozitě či naopak ‚konceptuálnímu‘ diletantismu (dvě polohy, do nichž se ‚Nová hudba‘ vyhrotila). 4. Akceptace ‚překonaných‘ stylů minulých období a jejich integrace do vlastního projevu – oproti programové štítivosti každé ‚Nové hudby‘ ke všemu starému.“¹⁹

Určite je potrebné zmieniť ešte jeden nerealizovaný projekt, ku ktorému bol pôvodne prizvaný aj Egon Bondy. Performer Ľubomír Burgr,²⁰ jeden z členov súboru Požoň sentimentál, ponúkol Bondymu rozsiahlejší priestor na osobnú výpoveď v plánovanom predstavení divadla SkRAT s názvom Čo bude zajtra s námetom rozdelenia Československa.²¹ Egon Bondy však spoluúčasť na príprave predstavenia napokon odmietol.²² Možno sa len dohadovať, čo bránilo Bondymu v umeleckej reflexii týchto udalostí, no podľa spomienok Marka Piačeka to bola preňho príliš bolestná téma, pravdepodobne cítil, že mu chýba potrebný nadhľad, ktorý, naopak, mal pri spracovávaní osudov postavy M. R. Štefánika. Za týmto negatívnym gestom človeka, ktorý zvyčajne vítal možnosť vyjadriť sa, cítime mučivý pocit bezmocnosti outsidera zosilňovaný vedomím nedostatočnosti ducha a – samozrejme – i tela, vedomie vlastnej neschopnosti či nemožnosti vykonať niečo „platné“.

Prvoplánové čítanie Bondyho textov k hudobným projektom môže vyvolávať dojem, že sa autor, verný svojej estetike totálneho realizmu, vyjadruje odosobnene, nezaujato až „dokumentárne“. No charakter hudobných projektov nás núti uvažovať odlišne. Poetika totálneho realizmu sa považuje za hlavnú výrazovú črtu estetiky básnických textov Egona Bondyho už od 50. rokov 20. storočia (kedy vznikla jeho zbierka Totální realismus, odhaľujúca odklon autora od surrealistickej poetiky). Literárna veda charakterizuje totálny realizmus (nielen Bondyho, ale napr. i Hrabala) snahou o vytváranie dojmu autentického, citovo neangažovaného, vlastne odosobneného záznamu „reality“, ktorú autor zásadne nehodnotí. Navyše, totálny realizmus je dôsledne dobový v tom, že využíva prostriedky aktuálnej vládnucej totalitnej estetiky. Niekedy sa označuje aj ako „dokumentárny“,²³ neemotívny, inokedy sa mu pripisuje antididaktický, ba až amorálny výraz zbavený politického postoja.²⁴ Ak prijmeme tieto charakteristiky Bondyho literárnej estetiky, potom musíme konštatovať, že mu takýto postoj nevydržal dlho – aspoň pokiaľ uvažujeme o jeho neskoršej prozaickej tvorbe vrátane textov k hudobným projektom. Tie sú svojím výrazom temer opakom toho, ako sa hodnotí jeho básnický totálny realizmus. Napr. Hatto ani Severin rozhodne nie sú „odpoetizované“ texty. Naopak, ich čaro spočíva v príkrom kontraste medzi individuálnym vnútorným svetom plným neuveriteľnej nehy a lásky (Severin!) a vecne chladnokrvným postojom k vonkajšiemu svetu. Rovnako ďaleko k postulátom totálneho realizmu má i kontrast medzi poeticky krásne a intenzívne sprostredkovaným pocitom neuhasiteľnej túžby, ktorá napokon predsa len vyprchá (Hatto), a odosobneným racionálnym hodnotením vlastnej existencie. Pri najlepšej vôli nenachádzame v týchto textoch neemocionálnosť, ani odstup a nehodnotenie. Poetický výraz týchto textov je navyše presýtený pátosom, čo je pravým opakom totálneho realizmu. Vo svojich posledných prózach je Egon Bondy ideologický (samozrejme v konkrétnom politickom zmysle), je moralizujúci (dokonca s náboženskými až mystickými sklonmi). V próze (vrátane libreta k opere Posledný let) je Egon Bondy jednoznačne umelec „s názorom“, a to názorom jasne vyjadreným.

Sám Egon Bondy vo svojej filozofii rieši východiská tejto poetiky a provokačne až pozérsky argumentuje v prospech postoja totálneho realizmu: „Podmínky, které jsou se značnou rafinovaností vytvořeny… jsou podmínky tak subhumánní… že nelze zodpovědně aplikovat žádný etický kodex, žádné etické přikázání, vůbec žádné etické normy. Nelze je aplikovat zodpovědně, to znamená, jejich aplikace ohrožuje na životě mne a obvykle do konce ještě jiné, neprovinivší se. … Nelze žádná etická přikázání doporučovat. … Nelze žádná preferovat! Nelze vůbec nic eticky hodnotit.“²⁶ Domnievam sa však, že tieto eticky strašné (vskutku strašné) slová nemožno chápať doslovne. Ich výrazový potenciál je súčasťou provokačnej a pozérskej povahy Bondyho ako literáta i človeka. Nemožno ich konzekventne vzťahovať na jeho umeleckú poetiku, pretože v ďalšom texte sú fakticky znegované. Vzápätí po nich totiž nasleduje veľmi dôležité konštatovanie, konklúzia: „To je protilidské, to je pekelné, to je zrůdné.“ Estetikou totálneho realizmu s jeho tradičnou charakteristikou uvedenou vyššie (t. j. estetikou neemocionálnosti, ne-etickosti atď.) by to bolo len v tom prípade, ak by sme povedané vnímali čisto lexikálne, bez interpretácie – čo, pravda, nie je možné. Na základe prirodzeného spôsobu čítania – teda interpretačného postoja k textu – musíme konštatovať, že tento filozofický text je nabitý mravnosťou, etickým apelom a čo je obzvlášť dôležité pre Bondyho ako umelca – etickým hodnotením. Ak teda Bondyho umelecké texty (vrátane libreta k opere Posledný let) sú súčasťou poetiky totálneho realizmu, potom sme nútení ju interpretovať ako autorský zámer, ako pozérstvo, ako zámernú štylizáciu. A pozérstvo, sklony k umeleckému exhibicionizmu si Bondy sám neraz priznával, poetické prostriedky masívne využíval aj vo svojich filozofických textoch, nepochybne s persuazívnym zámerom: „Chci se omluvit za vědomé užití určitých artistních praktik…“²⁷

Všetko, čo bolo doteraz povedané o Bondyho estetike vrátane predpokladu jeho vedomého vytvárania dojmu/výrazu poetiky totálneho realizmu, bolo inšpirované práve interpretáciou libreta, hudby a inscenácie opery Posledný let.²⁸ V zmysle takto vnímanej Bondyho poetiky možno potom považovať jeho spoluprácu s postmodernými bratislavskými hudobníkmi za paradoxnú. Bondy je svojím dôrazne eticky vyhraneným názorom pravým opakom nepatetického (nie však neetického!) životného pocitu umelcov s postmoderným tvorivým postojom. Bondy ako zarytý modernista s potrebou všade nachádzať a zreteľne vyjadrovať mravný imperatív verzus realizátori opery – postmodernistický, z idealizmu a moralizmu „vyliečený“ tvorivý tím. Inscenácia opery je výsledkom stretu dvoch odlišných poetík. Je teda potrebné dôsledne rozlišovať: Bondyho libreto k opere a jeho vlastné realizačné predstavy reprezentujú celkom iný svet než skutočná finálna realizácia opery. Iný svet práve v zmysle umeleckej poetiky.²⁹ Na realizácii inscenácie sa podieľali všetci členovia autorského tímu – druhá libretistka Ria Kmeťová, tanečníčka Monika Čertezni a najmä autor hudby Marek Piaček a režisér a scenárista Dušan Vicen. Títo všetci aktívne zasahovali do výsledného tvaru libreta a koncepcie predstavenia, i keď príspevok Bondyho k celému dielu zostal „zásadný“, ako sa vyjadril Marek Piaček.³⁰

Podklady k libretu spracoval Egon Bondy vo forme rešerší z historických prameňov a iných sekundárnych historických materiálov o živote M. R. Štefánika. Z tohto veľmi osobného a špecifického výberu životných faktov možno vystopovať nápadnú osobnú afinitu Bondyho k osobnosti M. R. Štefánika. Napriek zrejmej a pochopiteľnej odlišnosti životných osudov Bondyho a M. R. Štefánika nápadne vystupuje do popredia zopár spoločných charakteristík. Bondy v podkladoch k libretu vypichol niekoľko kľúčových momentov týkajúcich sa životných pocitov, ktoré pripomínajú viac či menej aj okolnosti Bondyho života, jeho postojov a životných pocitov.

Milan Rastislav Štefánik bol pre Bondyho veľkou výzvou nepochybne aj preto, že cítil istú spolupatričnosť v tragických pocitoch vyvierajúcich z nezastaviteľného vývoja politickej situácie a intenzívneho osobného nutkania k angažovanosti. Autor libreta opery a jej hrdina iste nevnímali rovnako sociálne väzby, no zdá sa, že osobné vzťahy a existenciálne konzekvencie z nich vyplývajúce vnímali obaja ako ťažko riešiteľný (ak vôbec) problém. A pocity fyzickej nedostatočnosti plynúcej z podlomeného zdravia boli pre oboch tiež spoločné, rôzne svedectvá na oboch stranách vypovedajú, že svoj fyzický stav prežívali veľmi trpko a bolestne. Nutkanie k pracovnej aktivite a pocit osobnej zodpovednosti vyvolávali v oboch až fatálne stavy bezmocnosti. Egon Bondy aj M. R. Štefánik boli nezakontextovaní vo vlastnom bytí – nielen pocitovo, existenciálne, ale tak trochu i reálne – domov nepociťovali ako útočisko, neposkytoval im možnosť spočinutia, pokoja. Naopak, uvedomovanie si konzervatívnosti domova, jeho nevyhnutnosti väzieb na všetko konformné, jatrilo ich duše. Boli nepochopení (cítili sa nepochopení), cítili sa odstrčení, obaja tak veľmi dúfali v zlepšenie pomerov, a tak veľmi im bolo jasné, že vo vtedajšej situácii je zlepšenie nereálne. Pocit absurdnosti života prameniaci z nepredvídateľnosti a neovplyvniteľnosti životných okolností bol im obom tiež spoločný. Autenticky a naplno prežívané vedomie mravného imperatívu deklarované v nespočetných textoch M. R. Štefánika i Egona Bondyho, niektoré eticky kontroverzné fakty z ich života (napr. údajné kontakty oboch s dobovou tajnou službou) boli nepochybne veľkým motívom, ktorý Egon Bondy vnímal ako súčasť dôverne známej absurdnosti životnej reality.

Bytostný záujem o človečenstvo prejavoval Bondy vo všetkých aktivitách, bez ohľadu na to, či písal básne, prózu, filozofickú spisbu alebo libreto k opere. Všetky jeho texty sú v skutočnosti masívnym výkladom a popisom intímneho pocitu nezakontextovanosti v bytí s detailnou argumentáciou jeho oprávnenosti. Filozofické práce Bondyho, inak dôsledne logické a metodologicky korektné (v kontexte jeho osobnej nesubstančnej ontológie), sú jedinečné i v tom, že argumentácia z veľkej časti načiera do sféry ľudskej tvorivosti, kultúry. Nech už hovoril o akomkoľvek probléme, každý prirodzene vzťahoval k vývoju civilizácie. Jeho výklad ideových tendencií vždy gravitoval ku kultúre a treba povedať, že to platí i vice versa – každú „kulturologickú“ tému vnímal v skutočnosti ideologicky (samozrejme v širokom zmysle tohto slova). Gravitačné väzby kategórií: civilizácia – ideológia – kultúra sú alfou Bondyho filozofie. Jeho omegou je existenciálny paradox – na jednej strane veľký osobný záujem o podstatu veci a zároveň úpenlivá snaha zostať „mimo“. Zdá sa, že ako filozof sa Bondy vyžíval v situácii referenčnej funkcie pozorovateľa, ktorý je súčasne aj agensom, ovšem nedobrovoľným. Intenzívna snaha o duševnú rezistenciu konkluduje celkom logicky k pocitu existenciálnej nepatričnosti, „nezakontextovanosti“. Bondy nedokázal, nemohol, nechcel sa zakontextovať do takého života, aký mu ponúkali okolnosti. Utekal z neho, dokonca i vtedy, keď v ňom zostal. Tento „bondyovský“ paradox je neoddeliteľnou súčasťou jeho tvorby – využívané umelecké prostriedky ako kontradikcia žiadaného a dosahovaného umeleckého výrazu. Poetika totálneho realizmu nám môže nahovárať, že pomocou svojej irónie a cynizmu bol schopný svoju existenciu uniesť. Interpretácia jeho tvorivej poetiky však hovorí skôr o tom, že „toto všetko“ znášal len veľmi ťažko… Totálny realizmus bol ale zrejme jediným umeleckým prostriedkom, ktorým mohol vyjadriť svoje trvalé tvrdohlavé zásadné odmietanie pritakať tej podobe života, v akej sa mu javil a akú mu ponúkala.

Poznámky

• ¹ Bondy, Egon: Agónie. Epizóda 96. Bratislava: Marenčin PT 1997, s. 17. (Text zvýraznila autorka.) — ² Ibidem, s. 19. — ³ Ibidem.
• ⁴ Bondy, Egon: Juliiny otázky. In: Filosofické eseje. Sv. 2. Praha: DharmaGaia 1993, s. 40–45.
• ⁵ Podrobnú interpretáciu opery Posledný let vo vzťahu k Bondyho libretu pozri Beličová, Renáta: Egon Bondy a slovenská hudobná postmoderna. In: Fedrová, S. (ed.): Česká literatura v intermediální perspektivě. Praha: Akropolis – ÚČL AV ČR 2011, s. 61–74. — ⁶ Podrobnú interpretáciu Urban Songs vrátane Bondyho participácie na tomto projekte pozri ibidem.
• ⁷ Postmodernou tu nemyslíme štýl ani skupinovú poetiku. Týmto pojmom vyjadrujeme inakosť umeleckého gesta ako celku voči tradičnej modernistickej tvorbe tak v hudbe, ako v ostatných umeniach. K skladateľom, ktorí „majú blízko k filozofickej a názorovej platforme obdobia postmoderny 80. a 90. rokov 20. storočia“, patria všetci členovia súboru Požoň sentimentál, a to nielen ako hudobníci, ale aj ako komplexní umelci, performeri (pozri Martináková, Zuzana: Marginálie k tvorbe mladej slovenskej skladateľskej generácie. In: Beličová, R. (ed.): Hudobný život na Slovensku – kontinuita či diskontinuita? 3. Pluralita hudobných štýlov a hudobných poetík. Žilina: Katedra hudby FPV ŽU 2010, s. 42–58).
• ⁸ Stretnutia sa konali v študovni Hudobného centra vďaka jeho riaditeľke Oľge Smetanovej a vedúcej oddelenia dokumentaristiky a informatiky Anne Žilkovej. — ⁹ Neskrývaným vzorom pre tieto stretnutia bola desaťročia trvajúca legendárna tradícia otvorených polo-verejných – polo-súkromných stretávaní sa s hudbou, ktoré pestoval prof. Ján Albrecht vo svojom dome v centre Starého Mesta. — ¹⁰ Z osobného rozhovoru s Markom Piačekom, dňa 21. 5. 2010.
• ¹¹ Večery novej hudby – festival, ktorého iniciátorom a spoluzakladateľom bol Daniel Matej. V roku 2010 sa konal jeho posledný 20. ročník. — ¹² Melos-Étos je medzinárodný festival súčasnej hudby. Ako bienále ho organizuje Hudobné centrum s podporou Ministerstva kultúry SR, realizuje sa od roku 1991.
• ¹³ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ Citované zo zvukového záznamu osobného rozhovoru autorky s Markom Piačekom, dňa 21. 5. 2010.
• ¹⁴ Výrazným centrom takýchto aktivít je od roku 2004 A4 – nultý priestor, ktorý podporuje a poskytuje možnosti pre tvorbu umeleckých a kultúrnych akcií. V istom zmysle ho možno považovať za pokračovateľa dnes už zaniknutého legendárneho bratislavského divadla Stoka a rovnako ako ono, aj A4 neustále bojuje s existenčnou neistotou a slabou podporou oficiálnych kultúrnych inštitúcií.
• ¹⁷ Súbor inicioval tzv. „volanie po partitúrach“, výzvu pre všetkých hudobných skladateľov na tvorbu súčasnej „regionálnej“ európskej hudby pre menší ansámbel hudobníkov. — ¹⁸ Obsadenie orchestra podľa potreby doplňajú ďalší hudobníci: Ronald Šebesta (klarinet/basklarinet/basetový roh), Martin Čorej (gitara), Petr Michoněk (violoncello), Peter Šesták (viola). — ¹⁹ Šťastný, Jaroslav: Požoň sentimentál. (Online 18. 5. 2010), http://www.pozon.sk/index.php?l=sk
• ²⁰ Ľubomír Burgr je zakladajúcim členom Požoň sentimentálu a spolu s Petrom Zagarom, Borisom Lenkom a Markom Piačekom patrí do kmeňového „kvarteta“. — ²¹ SkRAT nadväzuje na činnosť združenia Pre súčasnú operu v Bratislave, ktoré vzniklo v roku 2000 ako prejav nedostatku možností realizovať súčasné divadelno-hudobné, resp. operné tvary bez kompromisov, ktoré prináša spolupráca s veľkými opernými a divadelnými scénami. — ²² Predstavenie sa napokon realizovalo, plánovaný filozofický osobný vstup Egona Bondyho nahradil text Tao, ktorého autorom bol slovenský filozof doc. Jozef Piaček, hudbu zabezpečil súbor Požoň sentimentál, ktorý hral okrem iného skladbu Petra Zagara Tao (pozri Požoň sentimentál – Minimal, CD).
• ²³ Vlach, Lukáš: Podoby totálního realismu v díle Bohumila Hrabala. In: Fedrová, S. – Hejk, J. – Jedličková, A.: Poetika programu – program poetiky. Praha: ÚČL AV ČR 2007. — ²⁴ Porov. Pelán, Jiří: Bohumil Hrabal: Pokus o portrét. Praha: Torst 2002.
• ²⁶ Bondy, Egon: Leden na vsi. 2. vyd. Praha: Torst 2007, s. 44–45. — ²⁷ Ibidem, s. 26.
• ²⁸ Pozri Beličová 2011 (cit. v pozn. 5). — ²⁹ Pozri interpretáciu opery in: Beličová, Renáta: Koniec veľkých príbehov. Opera Posledný let. In: Uličný, O. (ed.): Eurolingua & Eurolitteraria. Liberec: Technická univerzita 2009, s. 289–300. — ³⁰ V osobnom rozhovore s autorkou, dňa 21. 5. 2010.

Prepis z tlačenej publikácie (OCR), drobné odchýlky od originálu sú možné. Originál: Myšlenkové toposy literatury v česko-slovenských souvislostech (minulost a současnost). Ed. Ivo Pospíšil, Anna Zelenková. Brno: Tribun EU / Česká asociace slavistů 2014, s. 229–245.