Tragedy and Resistance in Antigona a tt druht by Peter Karvas
Charles Sabatos
Yeditepe University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, no. 811, Department of English Literature,
26 Agustos Yerle§imi, 34755 Kayi§dagi, Istanbul, Turkey
charles.sabatos@gmail.com
This article analyzes the socialist-era adaptation of Antigone by Slovak playwright Peter Karvas (Antigone and the Others, 1962) through some of the most influential theoretical interpretations of the classical text by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Lacan.
Keywords: Slovak literature / drama / tragedy / literary characters / Antigona / Karvas, Peter
Antigone, who stands alone against King Creon of Thebes in her defense of her dead brother's corpse, has inspired philosophers and playwrights for centuries. The substantial tradition of Antigone interpretation dates to the nineteenth century: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807) draws on Sophocles to explain his ethical dialectic, and S0ren Kierkegaard, in Enten — Eller (Either/Or, 1843), draws important distinctions between ancient and modern tragedy. In the twentieth century, contemporary versions of Antigone by dramatists like Brecht and Anouilh began to appear with increasing frequency, while Jacques Lacan applied psychoanalytic theory to the work in a series of lectures. In his study Antigones, George Steiner has analyzed many of these interpretations and adaptations. He refers to a "remarkable" Slovak version in which Antigone is "one of a whole group of inmates who are seeking to organize resistance to the 'Creon'-Kommandant." (197) Although Steiner admits he does not "have access" to the play, his insight into it may be based on the title itself, which indicates Antigone's role as one of a collective: Antigona a ti druhi (Antigone and the Others, 1962) by Peter Karvas. Zoltan Rampak also highlights "the modern heroism of the collective against the individual heroism of antiquity" as the most novel feature of its approach (107). First produced at the Slovak National Theater in Bratislava, Karvas's Antigona was also performed at various Czech theaters (including the National Theater in Prague), as well as in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Austria, Romania, and the Soviet Union (Lajcha 71—72).
After the culturally productive period from the founding of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 to the Munich Pact that dismembered it
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in 1938, Czech and Slovak literature endured a period of severe repression: the six brutal years of Nazi occupation and then, a few years later, roughly a decade of the Communist consolidation of power. By the late 1950s, the period of liberalization following Stalin's death allowed for a cautious return to some level of artistic freedom. One of the favorite themes taken up by writers during this time was the wartime experience, usually condemning Nazi brutality. The standard approach involved heroic, masculine partisans (often with a stronger, more passionate Russian man to show them the way toward freedom,) women who maintained their inner virtue under the most degrading circumstances, and foul, if not bestial, German officers. Since socialist realism required a happy ending, the emphasis was most often on the closing months of the war and the fall of the Germans, usually heralded by the arrival of Red Army troops. (The Slovaks were in this case at an advantage, because of the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 against Slovakia's Fascist puppet regime; by contrast, the Czechs, incorporated directly into the Third Reich, had made little overt resistance except for the assassination of the leading Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.) Some of these works, such as the prose of Slovak authors Dominik Tatarka and Ladislav Mnacko, had some lasting literary significance; many of them were essentially propaganda. In a few cases, the authors used the officially-approved method of condemning German tyranny as a subtle means of criticizing the subsequent Communist regime, as in the case of Josef Skvoreckys The Cowards, which caused a scandal on publication in 1959. For Karvas, as a writer of Jewish origin whose parents had been murdered by the Nazis, the theme of fascism was deeply personal as well as politically suitable. His 1959 play Pohocna omsa (Midnight Mass), in which a family's Christmas celebration is interrupted by a German guest while their son (a resistance fighter) is hidden upstairs, retains its powerful sense of moral conflict; it is one of relatively few works from that era still performed in Slovakia. Two years later, Karvas created his contemporary version of Antigone as a continuation of his reflections on the war. According to Viliam Marcok, Karvas "attempted to artistically update the theme of anti-fascist resistance by historically monumentalizing the situation in a concentration camp through the use of the famous ancient story, and internally dramatized it with the help of the then fashionable (for example in Durrenmatt) existentialist modeling of the situation." (296)
Milan Kundera is best known in the West as a novelist, but his most successful play Majitele klicu (The Master of the Keys) premiered in Prague in 1962, soon after Karvas's Antigona. Alfred French has compared these two works, which both outwardly conformed to socialist models: "In the
Charles Sabatos: Tragedy and Resistance in Antigona a ti druhi by Peter Karvas
case of Kundera's play there is a note of scepticism, almost of parody. In the case of Karvas's Antigona there is no hint or suspicion of such critical treatment." The effect of replacing Antigone's deed with "collective resistance," French notes, has the effect of making "the play seem less like a tragedy and more like a socialist morality play." (162) In his essay collection Le Rideau (The Curtain, 2005), Kundera reflects upon Hegel and the concept of tragedy in Antigone:
Antigone inspired Hegel to his magisterial meditation on tragedy: two antagonists face to face, each of them inseparably bound to a truth that is partial, relative, but, considered in itself, entirely justified [. . .] Both are at once right and guilty. Being guilty is to the credit of great tragic characters, Hegel says. Only a profound sense of guilt can make possible an eventual reconciliation. (110)
He also recalls "an adaptation of Antigone I saw in Prague shortly after the second world war; killing off the tragic in the tragedy, its author made Creon a wicked fascist confronted by a young heroine of liberty. Such political productions of Antigone were much in fashion then. Hitler not only brought horrors upon Europe but also stripped it of its sense of the tragic." He wonders if this is a "regression" into a "pre-tragical stage. . . But if so, who has regressed? Is it History itself? Or is it our mode of understanding History? Often I think: tragedy has deserted us; and that may be the true punishment." (Kundera 110—111) Whether or not the version he refers to is Karvas's, which seems possible, this critique echoes one of Kundera's central themes, showing how even the greatest of ancient tragedies is no match for the demands of socialist ideology. While the original Antigone becomes fearsome by going beyond the limits of expected human behavior, Karvas's Antonie, or "Anti" (also called "Tonka"), is never more than human. As part of a collective, this Slovak Antigone lacks the distinctive individuality that has made her forebear so timeless.
As Georg Lukacs notes in his influential study of the historical novel and historical drama, "It is certainly no accident that the great periods of tragedy coincide with the great, world-historical changes in human society. Already Hegel, though in a mystified form, saw in the conflict of Sophocles' Antigone the clash of those social forces which in reality led to the destruction of primitive forms of society and to the rise of the Greek polis." (97) Hegel's essay "The Objective Spirit" begins with the "universal essence" encompassing human life, and divides it into dialectical components: spirit is divided by action into "substance, and consciousness of the substance." He distinguishes substance from consciousness in explicitly political terms: "[A]s actual substance, it is a nation, as actual consciousness, it is the citizens of that nation." The substance itself "splits it-
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self up into distinct ethical substances, into a human and divine law." The human law is represented by the State; the divine law by the Family, "a natural ethical community," which, "as the element of the nation's actual existence ... stands opposed to the nation itself." (266—268) Hegel's concept of the Family is more than a simple biological association; it is "an immediate connection of separate, actual individuals," which "is not that of feeling, or the relationship of love." There is an inherent conflict here: "[T] he End and content of what [the individual] does and actually is, is solely the Family," yet the "positive End peculiar to the Family is the individual as such." (269) These distinctions are clearly drawn in Karvas's Antigona a ti druhi, whose very title is dialectical (although ultimately Anti does not stand in opposition to "the others," but with them.) The setting of a Nazi concentration camp represents, for the contemporary imagination, the "human law" of the State taken to a negative extreme. The "citizens" of this mini-state are those who have stripped of any rights as citizens of the larger state, as serve as the "others" (Communists, Jews, gypsies, etc.) against which the remaining "citizens" can identify themselves. The "Family" in this case, which sets the "divine" law of socialist revolt against the "human" law of the commandant, is the group of prisoners, bound not by blood ties, but by a shared ethical opposition to the inhumanity of the camp. As Jarka Burian explains, "The issue is that of collective humanity against evil . The play effectively blends suspense and psychological conflict, the latter evident in the frequent clashes of temperament among the comrades in the camp." (302) The conflict arises, as in the original, with the leader's edict forbidding the outcast member of the society to be buried. The manner in which it is resolved, however, differs considerably in the socialist-era version.
The conflict begins in Antigona a ti druhi when the Nazi commandant Gerhardt Krone, anxious to maintain his power over the camp as enemy troops approach, orders the body of the resistance leader Leopold Kühne (nicknamed "Polly") to be left in the snow, unburied, as a warning to the others. Karvas's Haemon figure is a newly-arrived young prisoner, Josef Hajman, who falls in love with Anti before realizing that she is the mistress of Krone's henchman Horst Storch, the most explicitly evil character in the play. The additional characters, who are actually set apart in the list of dramatispersonae under the heading of "the others," include a Colonel, a Professor, and two younger men, Zäris and Zeman. The first act is devoted largely to the discussions among these characters, interrupted at intervals by visits from Anti and by vicious inspections by Krone and Storch. It begins with the news that Kühne is dead, and Zäris rebukes himself for not being able to show him any support:
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ZARIS: Profesor, vieš si to vobec predstavil? Stojiš na apelplaci, ešte žiješ, dychaš, v hlave ti to ešte funguje—na vlastne uši počuješ Kroneho: kym budeš nažive, nikto ti vody nepoda, krv ti nepoutiera ... a až budeš po smrti, nikto k tebe nepride, nikto ^a nepochova, premeniš sa na zmrznutu kopku kože a chlpov ... Vieš, chcel som mu aspon povedal par slov. (5)
[ZARIS: Professor, can you even imagine it? You're standing on the roll-call square, still living and breathing, your mind is still working—and you hear Krone with your own ears: "As long as you're still living, no one will give you any water, or wipe away your blood ... and when it's all over, no one will come to you, no one will bury you, nothing will be left but a frozen pile of skin and hair" ... You know, I wanted to say at least a few words to him.]
While Kühne's unspecified actions against the "State" of the camp were taken out of ethical affiliation with the "Family" of underground partisans, he had been singled out for a cruelly individual punishment. (The language used by Krone toward Kühne has deliberate parallels to the imagery of Christ's suffering on the cross, jeered at by Roman soldiers.) Yet Kühne has attained what Hegel explains as "universality," since although "death is the fulfillment and the supreme 'work' which the individual as such undertakes on [the ethical community's] behalf." (270) In the original, of course, Antigone is resolute in her action from the opening lines, and seems almost inhuman in her indifference to the reactions of those around her. Karvaš's Anti, by contrast, is a humanizing force within the camp, but lacks the astonishing will of Antigone. In Hegel's view, "the feminine, in the form of the sister, has the highest intuitive awareness of what is ethical ... the relationships of the woman are based, not on feeling, but on the universal." (274) Anti's personality fits the Romantic image of a virtuous woman, with closer affinities to Hegel's image of Antigone than to her Sophoclean predecessor.
The first interlude, following the first act, is an adaptation of the opening scene in Sophocles, a dialogue between Antigone and Ismene. This is the only scene in which Karvaš's Ismena appears: rather than Anti's sister, she is a Greek fellow prisoner. A symbolic "little sister" to the "others," Anti agonizes (at times almost helplessly) about her obligation to the dead Polly. Despite her "intuitive awareness" of ethical duty toward members of the "Family," her thoughts are unclear:
ANTI: Popraveny ... mrtvy človek je vel'mi osamely. ISMENA: Čo vraviš?
ANTI: Povedala som, že osamely človek je vel'mi mrtvy. ISMENA: Povedala si dačo ineho. ANTI: Nie.
ISMENA: Vždy všetko popletieš ... ! (27-28)
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[ANTI: Executed ... a dead man is so terribly solitary.
ISMENA: What did you say?
ANTI: I said that a solitary man is so terribly dead.
ISMENA: You were saying something else.
ANTI: No.
ISMENA: You're always mixing everything up!]
In fact, what seems to be mental confusion on Anti's part is actually a reiteration of a guiding theme in the play: to be solitary is to be dead, and hence life exists only in the community. The underlying conviction is that what is good for the community of "others" is good for the individual, or as Hegel describes: "The ethical realm is in this way in its enduring existence an immaculate world, a world unsullied by any internal dissension." (278)
In Act 2, Anti enters the group's barracks, lamenting her inability to carry out her intended burial of Kühne:
ANTI: Nemozem ho sama pochova^.
PROFESOR: Pollyho ...?!
ANTI: Je taky vel'ky ... Taky ^azky. A cely je zmrznuty na kos^.
PROFESOR: Ma horucku, nevidite ... ?
ANTI: Mam slabe ruky. A prsty mi krvacuju. Celu kozu som si odrela. A stale som
sa bala, ze sa prebudi... (36)
[ANTI: I can't bury him alone.
PROFESSOR: Polly ...?!
ANTI: He's so big ... So heavy. And he's frozen to the bone.
JOSEF: She has a fever, don't you see.?
ANTI: My hands are weak. And there's blood flowing from my fingers. All of my
skin is worn off. And I was constantly worried that they would wake up.]
Anti is anxious at the thought that she will be unable to complete her task. One might also note that the task of honoring the dead has become more daunting in this situation: rather than sprinkling the corpse with dust, Anti must dig with bare hands through soil that is frozen solid.
Kierkegaard's essay, "The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern," compares the classical and modern essence of tragedy, examining the portrayal of pain and sorrow: "In ancient tragedy," he explains, "the sorrow is deeper, the pain less; in modern, the pain is greater, the sorrow less ... Pain always implies a reflection over suffering which sorrow does not know." (145) Pain and sorrow, for Kierkegaard, constitute a dialectic: "The true tragic sorrow consequently requires an element of guilt, the true tragic pain an element of innocence; the true tragic sorrow requires an element of transparency, the true tragic pain an element of obscurity."
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(149) Sophocles' Antigone does not dwell on her bloody hands, nor is she anxious about being discovered by the authorities. This anxiety is where Kierkegaard would "discover a definition of the modern idea of the tragical. For anxiety is a reflection ... the organ by which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it." (152) Antigone's sorrow lies in the choice she must make; Anti's anxiety lies in the additional fear that the task she has set will be beyond her capabilities. The reaction of the "others" somewhat later in that act reveals how inadequate Anti's solitary attempt has been:
PORUČiK (inym hlasom): Niekto bol v noci u Pollyho. PROFESOR (ticho): Tonka! ... PORUČiK (zamyslene): To nemohla byf Tonka. ZARIS (pozdraždene): Prečo nie?!
PORUČiK: Pollyho našli v inej polohe, než v akej bol večer. Tonka je, chud'a, ani muška! Polly je primrznuty k zemi! (41—42)
[COLONEL (in a different voice): Someone went to Polly in the night. PROFESSOR (quietly): Tonka! ...
COLONEL (absorbed in thought): It couldn't have been Tonka. ZARIS (irritated): Why not?!
COLONEL: They found Polly in a different position than he was in the evening. Poor Tonka is as weak as a fly! Polly was frozen to the ground!]
Since Anti is unable to complete the task herself, the crisis which arises is different from the original conflict. The ancient Antigone was indifferent, even scornful, of the citizens of Thebes, but the modern Anti must rally the other prisoners behind her (just as they "follow" her in the title itself.) The "communal" aspect of the project becomes clear: losing a single comrade, even a dead one, is unacceptable.
Just as the first interlude (after Act 1) temporarily shifts the scene away from the "others" to the private conversation between Anti and Ismena, the second interlude (following Act 2) features Krone and Storch. In defiance of the foreign air forces that are already bombarding the camp, Krone orders an even more drastic measure:
KRONE (vzchopi sa): Storch! Okamžite postavite na apelplaci šibenice. STORCH: Teraz ...?! Je letecky poplach ... je tma—
KRONE: Tma?! Vam prekaža tma ...?! (Sleduje silnejuci hukot motorov) Šibenice sa stavaju potme, Storch, to vy neviete ...?! Vel'ke l'udske skutky potrebuju tmu. Najdoležitejšia časf dejin sa odohrala potme! (56) [KRONE (straightening up): Storch! You'll put up a gallows on the roll-call square immediately.
STORCH: Now.?! The alarm ... the dark—
KRONE: Dark?! You're bothered by the dark ...?! (Carefully listens to the in-
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creasing drone of motors) Gallows are put up in the dark, Storch, didn't you know
that ...?! Great human goals need the dark. The most important part of history
occurs in the dark!]
Thus we come to another distinction parallel to the difference in emphasis between sorrow and pain. According to Kierkegaard, "In ancient tragedy the action itself has an epic moment in it; it is as much event as action ... whereas in modern tragedy, the hero's destruction is really not suffering, but is action. In modern times, therefore, situation and character are really predominant." (141) The tragedy of the city of Thebes was not inherent, but derived from the immense suffering inflicted upon it. The setting of the concentration camp is inherently painful, however, with no hope for redemption through suffering. Only through action against such tyranny can one have any hope, even when facing the gallows. Several years later, in a 1968 interview, Karvas held to his views on collective action, even in cultural activity: "[L]iterature is for me one of the methods of keeping going, of not capitulating. Every person must have his own means of declaring 'no surrender,' otherwise he's fine. To make myself clear: this determination not to surrender must be linked in some way to another person, to all mankind." (Liehm 350) Karvas emphasizes his focus on action by featuring line 332 of Antigone (the beginning of an extended chant by the Chorus) as the epigraph to Antigona a ti druhi: "There are many powerful things on earth, but nothing more powerful than man."
Jacques Lacan draws attention to the same line, although it appears in a different translation: "There are a lot of wonders in the world, but there is nothing more wonderful than man," and cites Claude Levi-Strauss's view that these lines illustrate "the definition of culture as opposed to nature." (274) In his lectures (which first appeared in 1960, almost contemporaneously with Karvas's Antigond) Lacan explains the effect of Antigone's beauty, which stimulates excitement, as "a question of power ... a state of excitement is something that is involved in the sphere of your power relations; it is notably something that makes you lose them." The effect of Karvas's Anti is quite different; her power over the "others" is the ethical strength that inspires them to gather behind her, not an individual strength. Lacan is critical of Hegel, whom he says is "nowhere ... weaker than he is in the sphere of poetics, and this is especially true of what he has to say about Antigone." He does raise an intriguing point, however, in that Hegel's "conflict of discourses" is resolved in the spoken dialogues, which "move toward some form of reconciliation." (249) For Lacan, however, the idea that the play's resolution can be considered any form of "reconciliation" is highly doubtful, a view which he claims to share with Goethe. The utter
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devastation of the characters at the conclusion discourages such an interpretation. Karvaš's Antigona a ti druhi, while it ends tragically, does offer a form of affirmation. By rallying together, the prisoners have defied the State by upholding the Hegelian "divine law" of the partisan "Family." The key to the divergence between these two resolutions lies in the difference between the ancient and modern Antigones, particularly their difference in strength. Lacan (like Kierkegaard) provides insights into Antigone's character, focusing on the term Ate, "the limit that human life can only briefly cross." (263) Antigone has already found life too much to bear, and her rejection of Ismene for the latter's indecision is of "an exceptional harshness." Lacan sees this "enmity" toward her sister as "the enigma of Antigone ... she is inhuman." The Chorus describes her as "inflexible," which Lacan further explains as something "raw." When she finds the corpse, she moans "like a bird that has just lost its young." Thus the limit designated by Ate is "where the possibility of metamorphosis is located." (264—265)
In her inflexibility, Antigone moves beyond the limit to become something inhuman. Karvaš's Anti, however, fits the description that Lacan dismissively uses to characterize the insipid descriptions of other commentators: "She's the one, according to the Greek, who is made for love rather than for hate ... a really tender and charming little thing, if one is to believe ... those virtuous writers who write about her." (262) Her ability to preserve the "feminine" virtues of gentleness and compassion are presented as a form of strength in the dehumanizing conditions of the camp. Nonetheless, the frequent emphasis on her physical weakness makes her an unequal match to the classical Antigone. It is only in her confrontation with Storch near the end of the play that Anti shows some traces of Antigone's "inflexibility" and Freud's "death drive." Wishing to protect her, Storch suggests that Ismena had committed the crime instead, an idea which Anti rejects:
ANTI: Ismena ...? Chudinka ... Ta to nemohla urobtf. STORCH: Budeš čušaf—!
ANTI: Možeš rozhodova^ o tom, kedy zomriem, Storch. Ale to je všetko, o čom možeš rozhodova^.
STORCH (tlmene): Anti ...! Nedržal som ^a tol'ke mesiace nad vodou, aby som ^a teraz musel da^ odpravil pre nejaku maličkos^!
ANTI: To nie je maličkos^. To je najvačšia vec v mojom živote. Ani som netušila, že su na svete taketo velke veci. A že ja možem—
STORCH: Preboha živeho, či si už na všetko zabudla ...?! Bezo mna, by si už davno bola išla do plynu!
ANTI: Nezabudla som. Tu človek nemože zabudnu^ ani na to, na čo by chcel. (67-68)
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[ANTI: Ismena ...? Poor girl ... She couldn't have done it. STORCH: Be quiet!
ANTI: You can decide when I'll die. But that's all you can decide.
STORCH (subdued): Anti ...! I didn't protect you for so many months, only so
that you'd be destroyed over some trifle.
ANTI: It isn't a trifle. It's the greatest thing in my life. I had no idea that there were such great things in the world. And that I could—
STORCH: For God's sake, have you already forgotten about everything ...?! If it weren't for me, you would have gone to the gas long ago!
ANTI: I didn't forget. Here, a person can't even forget the things he might want to.]
It seems for a moment that Anti has reached her limit, that her memories create such pain that she would rather die. But this dialogue quickly turns melodramatic, rather than suggesting any "metamorphosis" beyond the human:
STORCH: Tak čo ešte chceš ...?! Potrebuješ ma! ANTI (pozrie nan, zvol'na): Ty ma potrebuješ, Storch. STORCH: Ja—teba?!
ANTI: Bezo mna, by si bol davno začal brechaf a hryzf ako tvoji vlčiaci. (Okamih.) Kerf si ma uvidel, začal si si nahovaraf, že dačo citiš ... Ze ešte nie si celkom zviera ... Ze maš kdesi ešte aj dušu. Bolo to užasne, maf dušu! Však? (68)
[STORCH: So what else do you want ...?! You need me! ANTI (looking at him freely): You need me, Storch. STORCH: I need—you?!
ANTI: If it weren't for me, you would have started to bark and bite like those wolfhounds of yours long ago. (Pauses) When you saw that I would have rather killed myself than have you come and touch me again, you started to make yourself believe that you felt something ... that you weren't a total animal yet ... that you still had a soul somewhere ... It was amazing to have a soul! Wasn't it?]
While Anti fits Hegel's image of the feminine with her "intuitive awareness of what is ethical," she shows none of the psychological complexity of the original as discerned by Lacan. Even her "inflexibility" is "tender and charming." In the conclusion of the scene, the "others" are inspired by Anti's bold stance and stand up to Krone, despite his taunts that he will kill them all. Disheartened by their collective resistance, he looks at his hands, insisting that they are clean—but of course, the hands of true virtue (as personified by Anti's earlier in the play) are dirty and bloodied with struggle. The emphasis on "situation and character" has become so formalized that Kierkegaard's distinction between "pain and sorrow" reach the point of meaninglessness, especially when a new socialist future is so near at hand. As Kundera would have it, in this confrontation between
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virtue and absolute evil, the "partial, relative, justified" truth of tragedy has
deserted Peter Karvas's Antigona a ti druhi.
WORKS CITED
Burian, Jarka. "Post-War Drama in Czechoslovakia." Educational Theatre Journal25.3 (1973): 299-317.
French, Alfred. Czech Writers and Politics, 1945—1969. Boulder: East European Monographs, 1982.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Karvas, Peter. Antigona a ti druhi. Bratislava: DILIZA, 1961.
Kierkegaard, S0ren. Either/Or. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Kundera, Milan. The Curtain. New York: Harper, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. New York, W. W. Norton, 1988.
Liehm, Antonin J. The Politics of Culture. New York: Grove Press, 1968.
Lajcha, Ladislav. Dramaticky svet Petra Karvasa. Bratislava: Narodne divadelne centrum, 1995.
Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. London: Merlin Press, 1962.
Marcok, Viliam. Dejiny slovenskej literatüry III. Bratislava: Literarne informacne centrum, 2006.
Rampak, Zoltan. "Antigona a ti druzi - jako podobenstvi." In Peter Karvas. Antigona a ti druzi. Translated by Sergej Machonin. Prague: Orbis, 1962. 101-107.
Steiner, George. Antigones. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Tragedija in upor v drami Antigona in drugi Petra Karvaša
Ključne besede: slovaška književnost / dramatika / tragedija / literarni liki / Antigona / Karvaš, Peter
Slovaški dramatik Peter Karvaš v drami Antigona a ti druhi (Antigona in drugi, 1962) svoje like postavi v okolje, ki je postalo ultimativni simbol zla in trpljenja v dvajsetem stoletju: nacistično koncentracijsko taborišče. Za njegovega sodobnika Milana Kundero je sicer jasno, da se je etična moč izvirne Antigone v njeni sodobni dvojnici razgubila. Medtem ko Karvaš navaja slavno Sofoklejevo misel, da na zemlji obstaja veliko močnih stvari, a da nič ni močnejše od človeka, se moč posameznika proti silam sodobnega zla v resnici izkaže za tako slabotno, da je preživetje možno le kot del kolektiva. Ta razprava preučuje Karvaševo igro na podlagi treh temeljnih tekstov o Antigoni. Najprej se s pomočjo Heglovega
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eseja o objektivnem duhu osredotoči na koncept »družine« v zvezi s skupino partizanov v taborišču. Potem v navezavi na Kierkegaarda primerja prikazovanje bolečine in žalosti v antični tragediji ter v njeni sodobni predelavi. Nazadnje se naveže na Lacanova predavanja o Antigoni in skuša izpeljati psihoanalitično primerjavo prvotnega dramskega lika in njene moderne različice. Medtem ko prvotna Antigona postane strašljiva, ko prekorači meje pričakovanega človeškega vedenja, Karvaševa Antigona nikdar ni več kot le človeška — vendar pa ji manjka tista individualnost, ki dela njeno predhodnico tako brezčasno.
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UDK 82nn.09-1Coleridge S. T.
Charles Sabatos: Tragedija in upor v drami Antigona in drugi Petra Karvaša
Članek analizira dramo Antigona in drugi (1962) slovaškega dramatika Petra Karvaša. Priredbo Antigone iz socialističnega obdobja analizira s pomočjo nekaterih najvplivnejših teoretičnih interpretacij klasičnega besedila (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lacan).
UDK 821.111.09-1Coleridge S. T.
Shang Biwu: Pripoved kot retorika: sodbe, potek in narativnost v Pesmi starega mornarja Samuela Taylorja Coleridgea
Članek raziskuje narativnost Pesmi starega mornarja Samuela Taylorja Coleridgea v nanašanju na dve dinamični ravnini, kakor ju konceptualizira James Phelan: besedilno in bralno. V omenjeni pesnitvi besedilna dinamika izhaja iz nestabilnih razmerij med mornarjem in njegovim položajem, kar sčasoma izzove večplastne odzive različnih agensov naracije, in sicer mornarja, svata in občinstva; gre za interpretativne, etične in estetske sodbe. Besedilna dinamika v povezavi z interakcijo med narativnimi sodbami ni le kompatibilna s progresivno močjo pesnitve, temveč okrepi njeno narativnost in jo tako približa pripovedi.
UDK
Mojca Krevel: Being in Time: Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being and the Postmodern Paradigm
Analysing the concepts of subject and reality in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being from the perspective of the governing principles of postmodern societies and cultures, the article charts the effects of current social and historical conditions, as well as the change of the dominant medium on novel and literature in general.
UDK 821.111.02-Pinter H.
Tomaž Onič:: Stylistic Characteristics of ... [Pause] ... Pinter's Dialogue
Halting dialogue is considered one of the main elements of Harold Pinter's style of writing that has become known as "Pinteresque." This paper examines the most salient features of Pinter's dramatic dialogue, illustrates it with the excerpts from his plays, and comments on the problems of its translatability into Slovenian.