The Second City: The space of the city of Košice in contemporary Slovak literature (original) (raw)

Slovenská literatúra, Volume 61, 2014, No. 6*, p. 91 - 102. ISSN 0037 – 6973 (print)

This reading of the urban space of Košice in eastern Slovakia will be based on texts both fictional and essayistic. The period covered will be the 1990s to the present day, but since we would like to offer an outline of the nature of the older, " latent " discussion of this space, it will be necessary to go back, outside this time-frame, into the 1960s and, in the case of Sándor Márai, whose significance for the contemporary literary reception of Košice is fundamental, into the first half of the 20th century (his novel Egy polgár vallomásai/confessions of a Bourgeois [1934], and essays Kassai őrjárat/Walks around Košice [1941]). A functional, i.e., an intimate and two-way semiotic relationship between a city and literary or creative texts is an attribute of a multidimensional urban space. this relationship exists on a number of levels, from the basic thematic level (the city and its life as a theme of literary texts) to more abstract levels, for example, the genealogical in the case of a space that signals (more or less obviously) the generic form of the text, and vice versa: the genre itself evokes a certain type of space.