Poetry
Stráž pri Morave
Not translated into English
Andrej Žarnov · 1925
Synopsis
Poems of alarm addressed to the nation by a poet who stands guard on the banks of the Morava. In them he speaks of his dying father, answers those who say that the Slovaks are not a nation, mocks the Magyaron, the Slovak who has gone over to the Hungarians, evokes the first of May, Jerusalem and the resurrection, the country's social misery and mass emigration, and swears an oath to his people. Social questions are seen there through a lens that is both national and Christian.
Context
The author's first book, printed in Bratislava by Únia in 1925 in the collection Knižnica Slováka. The Bratislava censor seized twenty-five poems out of forty, and on 9 June 1925 Andrej Hlinka and other deputies questioned the government in the Chamber in Prague, reproducing the texts and invoking freedom of the press; some of the poems had already appeared in the newspaper Slovák. The book then circulates with stanzas replaced by the word “censored”, and reaches its readers, in a fuller form, only through copies. Attached to the Catholic modernist movement, the author owes to this tone of alarm his nickname of poet of the whip.
Who it is for
A brief collection, in direct and harsh verse invective, born of a specific political moment in the young republic.
Prizes and reception
The book that at once made its author's reputation, seized by the censors and debated by the deputies.
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