The submitted contribution was prepared for the ESTS 2020 conference. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference was postponed by two years, and the time I gained as a result of the pandemic allowed me to expand the original contribution into a more extensive monograph titled Neznáme dielo Vojtecha Mihálika: Rekonštrukcia zbierky Ruža [The Unknown Work by Vojtech Mihálik: A Reconstruction of the Rose Collection]. The monograph was published in late 2021 in the Slovak language. The primary target audience of the monograph is Slovak readers, but the submitted text condenses the issues discussed in the monograph and is enriched with necessary contextual information for international readership. I view the publication of this text as an opportunity to share some of my findings with the broader international research community.
This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under Contract No. APVV-20-0414.
1Just like every other part of society, post-war literature in the former Czechoslovakia was affected by the political situation, the specifics of which were determined by the Soviet sphere of influence. After the Communist Party took over the government in 1948 and made an effort to completely seize control of all areas of society, the state’s editorial policy was gradually reorganized. After 1948, the 69 publishing houses that had existed in Slovakia were reduced to only 17, and they were assigned different segments of the publishing industry. Publishing was subject to the strict oversight of the Communist Party. The situation also had an impact on religious publishing houses, where only two remained out of the original eight — one Catholic (Spolok svätého Vojtecha) and one Lutheran (Tranoscius). Moreover, their activities were reduced to the publication of liturgical books and educational religious literature (see: Šútovec 2011). As the government was nationalizing publishing houses and taking control over them, the situation became difficult to navigate. Many documents were destroyed, while others were “saved” by employees of the publishing houses, who took them for safekeeping to prevent them from being destroyed. As a result, the archives from this period are very fragmentary.
2Editorial activities focusing on this period are also faced with another phenomenon: the censorship and self-censorship of authors. With the exception of writers who had already been leftist intellectuals in the interwar period, several authors shifted their thinking “to the left” after the onset of communism. This was because some of them saw socialism as having the potential to address the pressing social issues faced by post-war society, as well as being a counterweight to fascist trends. Some were drawn to socialist writing by opportunism, others were pressured to change their attitudes by censorship and publishing bans, but there were also authors who decided to give up the option to publish their literature in an official capacity rather than being forced to change the character of their writing.
- 1 Despite the fact that he did not support the research of his early, spiritual work and he would lat (...)
3Prominent Slovak poet Vojtech Mihálik’s unpublished collection of poems Ruža [The Rose], the reconstruction of which is presented in this paper, bears all of the previously mentioned marks of this period. Our search for this collection in the archive of the Tranoscius publishing house was unsuccessful, even though its manuscript had received recognition in a literary contest that the Tranoscius publishing house had organized in 1946. Another factor that comes into play is the fact that the poet gradually became closer to the communist regime. In the early period of his poetic writing, Mihálik considered himself a member of so-called Catholic modernism. But after his permanent shift towards atheist communism, he decided to hide, marginalize and even denounce his early Catholic writing, so not even he had an interest in making his early works known.1 Since Mihálik is one of the most important Slovak poets of the second half of the 20th century, naturally, this sparks an interest in discovering the collection.
- 2 See: “Výsledok Literárneho Súbehu Nakladateľstva Tranoscius” 1946, 4; “Radosť z Básnickej Rodiny Pl (...)
- 3 The report published in the Plameň [Flame] magazine, where Mihálik was a contributor, was published (...)
- 4 Nadrealism is, succinctly said, the Slovak modification of surrealism. For more information, see Vl (...)
4Two newspaper reports — the first one from late 1946, the second one from early 1947 — informed that the up-and-coming Slovak poet Vojtech Mihálik placed second in a literary contest organized by the Tranoscius publishing house with his collection of poems titled Ruža, and that he received the prize money associated with this placement.2. This is where the trail ends for the Ruža collection.3 The Tranoscius publishing house only published the work that finished first in the contest — nadrealist poet Július Lenko’s collection Hviezdy ukrutnice [Cruel Stars] (1947).4 In the following year, 1947, Mihálik debuted with his collection Anjeli [Angels] and the collection Ruža fell into oblivion.
5Of course, the first step was trying to find the contest documents in the archive of the Tranoscius publishing house, where wide-scale shredding had taken place in the 1950s. However, this search was unsuccessful. In addition to this, steps were taken to search Mihálik’s literary estate for the documents used for his contest submission. The core of the estate consists of manuscript notebooks where poems are ordered chronologically (a large part of them also include dates). However, our search in the estate did not yield any material records capturing a complete version of the Ruža collection, and neither is there a fragment that would stabilize a specific continuous part of the collection. The only preserved clue that serves as an indicator of the collection’s form is a list of poem titles for the Ruža collection found at the end of one of these manuscript notebooks (see Fig. 1). The notebook is titled Básne [Poems] and includes poems written between 28 September 1944 and 30 March 1946. It can be assumed that these poems, which are connected to the collection with certain degrees of likelihood, were scattered among Mihálik’s manuscript notebooks. Moreover, the fact that the list of poems was written at the end of a notebook, ending with a poem written on 30 March 1946, indicates that the poems in question are either present in this notebook or in other notebooks that preceded it chronologically.
6If the existing historical records of the texts cannot be relied upon, two options remain: either give up all hope of discovering the collection, or — especially considering the aforementioned facts, such as the list and poems found in the manuscript notebooks — try to reconstruct it experimentally despite the risk that it will not be completely identical to its historical version. At this point, it is relevant to state that if the preliminary research of the source materials had not offered such promising opportunities to reconstruct a complete version of the collection, the editor would not have embarked on such an expensive project. Without the option to reconstruct the complete collection, perhaps it would have been simpler to just record its known torso.
7So, what can a scholarly editor do in a situation like this, other than give up all hope of discovering the collection? One can either attempt to reconstruct the collection in order to create a complete version, or attempt to present the alternatives that may be considered with regard to the instructions provided by the list of poem titles, i.e. presenting a potential reconstruction process. A book is the optimal medium for the reconstructed, stabilized version of Ruža. If the text is to be offered to general readers, it needs to be stabilized and presented as a stable structure. The purpose of a book edition of the collection stabilized by the editor is to offer readers an undisturbed aesthetic experience of the poetry. The readers are presented with a stabilized text so that they can perceive the rhythmic, euphonic, imaginative, idea-related and other characteristics of the work of art in question, without having to deal with the unstabilized form of the text, its layers, grouping, etc. This step was taken with regard to the fact that “[t]exts as texts depend for readability, and indeed enjoyment, on their presence and simple, since culturally ingrained, availability in the materiality of the book” (Gabler 2016, XIV). On the other hand, the digital environment would be suitable for efforts to present the dynamic process of reconstruction, indicate connections in the composition, visualize the editor’s individual actions, and enable textual variations.
- 5 This is an attempt to formulate an answer to the question asked by Kathryn Sutherland during the pa (...)
8The goal of offering a complete version of Ruža raises the question of what role its editor plays as a textual critic, i.e. how the editor’s role is viewed.5 After the printing press was invented, texts no longer had to be copied by hand, but they could be typeset and replicated several times. This invention changed the way texts were distributed and preserved, what types of mistakes were common, etc. When preparing the text of a modern work of literature for publication, the editor is first expected to collect all textual documents representing the work, which will then be subject to textual criticism. These documents are then used to stabilize the text. Peter Shillingsburg mentions two significant shifts that have influenced the approach to contemporary critical editing: “The first shift replaced a quest for lost archetypes and unachieved ideals with practical materiality and a search for order in extant documents. The second replaced the ideal of original authenticity and of aesthetic sensitivity with social awareness” (Shillingsburg 2010, 167). However, in the case of Ruža, the option to rely on practical materiality and social awareness is limited. In the discussed case of Vojtech Mihálik’s collection, records in the form of a complete text of the collection cannot be used simply due to the fact that they have not been preserved. The only way of discovering the collection’s form at least partially is to “assemble” it using the preserved list. Of course, this may seem very suspicious to scholars as the editor might be seen as having excessive influence over the form of the text.
9The reconstruction of the Ruža collection of poems is a process, where the collection is assembled from fragments — in this case the poems themselves. The sources used are originals, even though they may contain unintended or non-authorial elements due to transmission. Unlike textual criticism in classical philology, the goal here is not to find the hypothetical oldest text, but a hypothetical text from 1946. This means that there is an attempt to “freeze” the text at a certain point of the poem’s development. The documents that “surround” the hypothetical version of the collection are used to create a text that could be presented to readers from the public. Of course, this approach is not in line with the common approaches to scholarly editing in modern literature. However, in every moment of the reconstruction, the editor relies on the textual records of individual poems. In this case, the whole collection is an eclectic version. The reconstruction of Ruža is a special case where the editor’s intervention in the stabilization of the text takes on an extreme form, his input in the stabilization of the text is significant and his role is exceptionally creative. However, this is not an example of limitless editorial creativity — the editorial construct is created within certain limits.
10Through this scholarly gesture, the stabilized collection would launch the social presence of the collection among the public. In addition to classical and medieval works, literary history includes many modern works of literature whose reception is based on editorial intervention. Throughout literary history, it is not uncommon for society to accept an editorial construct that has become a living part of the literary tradition. Notable examples include the posthumous editorial efforts to transform the unorganized notes of Blaise Pascal with the goal of creating a compact work, as well as an example from the Czech literary tradition, where poet Jan Neruda’s book Zpěvy páteční [Friday Songs] was first stabilized by Jaroslav Vrchlický in 1896, after Neruda’s death. After the death of Franz Kafka, his close friend Max Brod did not handle Kafka’s literary estate in line with the provided instructions, but rather he assumed the right for the editorial interpretation of Kafka’s works, which influenced the reception and interpretation of Kafka’s works for a long time. In 1977, Christopher Tolkien — with the help of Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay — used the unfinished projects of his father John Ronald Reuel Tolkien to prepare Silmarillion for print.
11But what should be done if the researcher only has a list of poems available rather than the collection in question, and historical records cannot be used as a starting point? First of all, it is necessary to assemble the most complete collection of textual documents relating to the literary work (relevant poem variants, correspondence, etc.), determine their mutual relationships, find potential violations in the texts and then attempt to draw all the available information from them. In each moment of this process, the preserved textual documents need to be approached critically. Through gradual accumulation, the information gained this way can be influenced by other, related information, and the textual corpus of the collection is gradually completed up to a point when it is no longer possible to rely on evidence. But what then? When all available reliable clues about the collection have been taken into consideration, it becomes necessary to do a reconstruction sui generis, which could provide a plausible version of the collection. In reality, this involves the consideration of all possible options and then moving within their boundaries.
- 6 Until 1950, Mihálik diligently recorded his poems one after another according to the date of their (...)
12The reconstruction process consisted of two general steps: reconstructing the composition of Ruža and reconstructing the poems themselves. In the first step, the corpus of manuscripts was used to pick the poems that would make up this edition of Ruža. The first decision that needed to be made was how to approach the author’s instructions in the list of poems that was recorded in his manuscript, such as when he crossed out the names of certain poems, or introduced a sense of uncertainty by adding one or more question marks behind their titles (as can be seen in Fig. 1). Since one poem with question marks is crossed out and other poems with question marks are not, it can be inferred that the poet first used a question mark to express his uncertainty about whether a poem should be included in the collection, then — as the final step — he removed it by crossing it out. Based on this rationale, crossed-out poems are not included in the reconstructed collection. This includes the poems Štyri dni exercícií [Four Days of Spiritual Exercises], Ťarcha myšlienky [The Weight of an Idea], Motív helénsky [A Hellenic Motif] and Karambol [Carom], which are included in the Appendix, along with other poems that were considered at first but later removed during the reconstruction process. On the other hand, poems marked with a question mark have their place in the collection.6
Figure 1: A transcription of the list of poems recorded in a manuscript notebook in Drahomíra Miháliková’s private archive of Mihàlik’s unpublished documents. See also footnote 1.
Quoted text by Mihálik; transcription by the author.
13This narrowed-down list was then used for looking up poems in Mihálik’s manuscript notebooks, where the poet wrote poems chronologically and included dates. Afterwards, the selected poems were used to form the content of the collection. Problems arose when working with the author’s poetry cycle titled Cesty [Roads]. Most of the poems were easy to identify because the poems in the handwritten notebooks consistently have titles. However, there were cases where several different poems in the notebooks shared the same titles (for example, in the handwritten notebooks containing Miháliks early works, there were two poems titled Úzkosť [Anxiety], ten poems titled Rispetto or Rispetti, etc.). If it was impossible to determine with certainty which of the poems with identical names belonged in the collection, it was necessary to support the choice with arguments. For example, it was simple to rule out the poems whose names appeared in the list, but which were written after 31 July 1946 — the submission deadline for the literary contest, serving as the terminus ante quem. These poems included Úzkosť written between 16 and 19 February 1948, Úľ [The Beehive] from 11 June 1947 and Rovnováha [Balance] from 28 May 1948. The poems Úzkosť written on March 22, 1945, Úľ from December 7, 1945, and Rovnováha from April 13, 1945 were therefore included in the collection instead. Three poems titled Sonet [Sonnet] were easy to identify since the list also provided a date for each of them (and there is no evidence to suggest that Mihálik did wrote any other sonnet on the given dates). In addition to all this, the Cesty poetry cycle includes as many as two poems with the title Údel [Fate]. Since it can be assumed that Mihálik had read the list of poems several times before submitting it for the contest (as evidenced by the crossed-out poems and those with question marks), this duplication cannot be considered a mistake. The manuscript notebooks include two poems titled Údel (written on 15 August 1943 and 5 March 1945). However, their order in the collection is not clear from the list.
14When the list was completed with all the unambiguously identifiable poems from the Cesty poetry cycle, three names in the list remained uncertain: Hmla [Fog], Rispetti and Trýzeň [Torment]. Reading the various poems that may be considered for each of the titles given in the list and doing a stylistic, motivic or thematic analysis does not provide a safe answer as to which of the uncertain poems belongs in the collection. The range of motifs and themes presented in the poetry cycle is too wide, so this criterion is neither sufficiently relevant nor sufficiently decisive. However, it also turned out that all the added poems in the cycle were ordered chronologically, including those that had been crossed out or moved in the original manuscript, such as Vojenská [A Military Poem]. Adding all this information (and ambiguity) to Mihálik’s notes from Figure 1 produces the following annotated version of his list of poems:
CESTY
Údel, 15 August 1943
Kohosi mi to pripomína, 28 February 1944
Plánky, 23 April 1944
Hmla, 1943 / Hmla, 3 June 1944
Póly, July 1944
Tak nečujne, 23 July 1944
Či vôbec, 24 July 1944
Mlčanie pod slnkom, 22 September 1944
Rispetti
Rispetto, 28 September 1944 /
Rispetto, 29 September 1944 /
Rispetto, 1 October 1944 /
Rispetto, 6 October 1944 /
Rispetti, 21 February 1945 /
Rispetti, 21 February 1945 /
Rispetti, 21 April 1945 /
Rispetto, 6 July 1945 /
Rispetto, 26 August 1945 Fragment, 9 November 1944
Trýzeň, 4 March 1945 / Trýzeň, 23 May 1945
Sonet, 20 March 1945
Haničkina cesta do neba, 21 March 1945
Úzkosť, 22 March 1945
Sonet, 23 April 1945
Podvod, 4 July 1945
Údel, 5 March 1945
Sonet, 6 July 1945
Angeloi, 16 November 1945
Chladná smrť, 21 November 1945
Úľ, 7 December 1945
Koncentrácia, 14 December 1945
Zmätená opera, 25 December 1945
Žije? Žije, 27 December 1945
STUHA
I., 17 January 1945
II., 22 January 1945
III., 24 March 1945
NÁMESAČNÁ CHLOÉ
30 August — 7 October 1945
ZADUMANÍ
Poklad, 22 November 1944
Exkluzívna, 1 October 1944
Hviezdica, 27 December 1944
Mlčanie, 9 November 1944
Sama, 14 November 1944
Mámenie, 16 December 1944
Kvitnúca, 23 December 1944
Nevysvetlila, 24 December 1944
Ako vlastne mizla, 1 January 1945
Spiaca, 3 January 1945
Melancholická, 5 January 1945
Katarzis, 8 January 1945
Svídanie, 9 January 1945
Kruh, 11 January 1945
Ľúbiaci tratí zrak, 12 January 1945
Teplúčko, 12 January 1945
Priznanie, 13 January 1945
AJ MOLOCHOVI POD ZUBY
- 7 According to the list (after the first search for poems and excluding the uncertain ones), the core (...)
Bez milosti, 21 August 1945
Dezertér, 6 June 1944
Vojenská, 22 July 1944
Rovnováha, 13 April 1945
Chvála zeme slovenskej, 24 April 1944
Mobilizácia, 4 May 1945
Glorifikácia, 7 May 1945
Vojna, 21 May 1945
Povojnová, 31 May 1945
Pod rumami klíči, 26 December 19457
15This led to an attempt to apply this chronological principle when making decisions about poems whose presence in the collection was uncertain. In the case of Hmla and Trýzeň, both titles appeared twice. In each case, however, only one of the poems fit in the time interval between when the two surrounding poems had been written. For instance, in the case of the poem Trýzeň, it was necessary to choose between two poems with the same title. Taking a look at the poem that directly precedes it in the list (Fragment) and the poem that comes directly after it (Sonet from 20 March 1945) results in the following fragment of three poems that appear after one another in the above list:
Fragment, 9 November 1944
Trýzeň, 4 March 1945 / Trýzeň, 23 May 1945
Sonet, 20 March 1945
16This specific rule applied in the Cesty poetry cycle is satisfied by the poem Trýzeň from 4 March 1945, which fulfills the chronological order of poems (9 November 1944, 4 March 1945, 20 March 1945).
17To start off the collection, the chronological approach used in the Cesty poetry cycle led to the selection of the poem Údel, which was written half a year earlier than the second poem in the list, Kohosi mi to pripomína [It Reminds Me of Somebody]. The other poem with the title Údel, written on 5 March 1945 and appearing later in the chronology, is also the proverbial exception to the rule, disrupting the chronological order of the poems that follow one another (Podvod [Deception], 4 July 1945 — Údel, 5 March 1945 – Sonet, 6 July 1945). With the exception of this poem, even if the list was expanded in both ways, the chronology would remain intact.
18The last remaining issue arose with the title Rispetti. It is uncertain whether Mihálik distinguished that rispetti is the plural form of the Italian word rispetto when he wrote poems named after this Tuscan genre of poetry. On the one hand, his manuscripts use both forms, which might indicate that he did indeed distinguish between the singular and plural forms of the word. On the other hand, his manuscripts include a single rispetto titled Najtichšie rispetti [The Most Silent Rispetti], which makes it seem that he either did not notice this difference or he did not distinguish between the two forms at the time of writing this poem. Although in Slovak poetry it has become a convention to use the term rispetti for a single rispetto as well, this does not sufficiently explain Mihálik’s alternating use of the two forms. However, if the poet knew about this difference when he was composing the collection, it can be expected that he included several rispetti in the collection. By the submission deadline for the literary contest, Mihálik had written nine rispetti titled Rispetto or Rispetti (one of the poems titled Rispetto was created after the deadline of the competition).
19Selecting only some of the rispetti for the reconstruction would come with a risk that the final selection would not include any of the original ones. On the other hand, including all nine rispetti in the collection might result in the presence of redundant ones, but the collection would include all rispetti that were present in the original collection. It could be argued whether it is better to remove integral parts of the collection or expand it with content that does not belong in it. This depends on how much it would alter the structure of the collection to add a poem that was not supposed to be included in it or, conversely, fail to include a poem that was supposed to be in it. For now, these questions remain impossible to answer.
20One alternative was to include three rispetti titled Rispetti, as their common use of the plural form might indicate that they are connected. However, the final selection was determined by the principle of chronological order; The interval between 22 September 1944 and 9 November 1944, which is delimited by the poems Mlčanie pod slnkom [Silence Under the Sun] and Fragment, now includes four rispetti titled Rispetto written between 28 September and 6 October 1944. One more thing that connects these four poems is their appearance in a single issue of the Akademik [Academician] magazine. After the reconstruction, the Cesty poetry cycle includes 26 poems. All poems included in the collection originate from two manuscript notebooks.
Básne [Poems]
15 August 1943 — 26 September 1944
116 pages; 10 x 16.5 cm; graph papier
126 poems (out of which 31 are translations)
Básne [Poems]
- 8 Miháliks early works from 1939 to 1950 are represented by eighteen notebooks or notepads of various (...)
28 September 1944 — 30 March 1946
150 pages; 10 x 16.5 cm; graph papier
143 poems (out of which 34 are translations)
The list for Ruža.8
- 9 The poems preserved from the editorial offices of the 1940s were in manuscript form. The only excep (...)
21The second step was to stabilize the wording of each poem that had a certain number of variants with alternative wordings, aiming to get closer to the hypothetical wording of the poem as it was when submitted for the contest in 1946. It needs to be highlighted that even a stabilized text in the manuscript is not in itself a guarantee of a wording identical to the one used for the contest. When the author copied the poem from the manuscript notebook to the contest submission, he might have reopened the writing process and chosen a different wording (even shortly before submitting the poem) without implementing these changes in the manuscript notebook.9 The editing process for the reconstructed edition of Ruža is based on invariants, as stabilized in the manuscript. The base text of the poem is selected from a specific genetic layer of poems with transformations present, or from a subsequent clean copy of the poem or a variant published in a magazine before the terminus ante quem. Therefore, since the poet only came out with his book debut in 1947, the book versions of these poems could not be used as base variants. These could potentially be used for the verification, correction, and stratification of the genetic layers.
22There is no universal determining criterium that could be applied to all the poems: while some are available as clean copies, some have new genetic layers incorporated into them, some are only available in a single (manuscript) variant, others have several variants and the date of publication comes into play. Not even the clever decision to automatically use the manuscript version or mechanically restore its last genetic layer would result in a simple solution: when there are new genetic layers in the manuscript, it can often be reasonably assumed that these may have been added after several years, when the poem was being incorporated in a different collection or anthology, perhaps even on several different occasions.
- 10 For instance, the poem recorded in the list as “Sonet (23 April 45)” was originally written in the (...)
23Therefore, there sometimes arose a need to directively determine principles according to which the stabilization of poem wordings was organized, yet the formulation of individual rules was based on certain criteria. This way, certain principles gradually arose during the reconstruction process, aiming to minimize the number of subjective decisions (for instance: the last version of each poem before the submission deadline for the literary contest should serve as the base text, even though this does not automatically mean the variant is identical to the one that was actually submitted). Some of the general principles of stabilizing the text were as follows: “The names of the poems are accepted in advance as those presented in the list of poems for Ruža, even if they had different names in specific parts of the manuscript notebook”,10 “If the only available variant is a clean copy from a manuscript notebook, this will be accepted as the base text without any issues”, “If the only available variant comes from a manuscript notebook, but the text includes new genetic layers, the last genetic layer will be extracted”, “If several variants are available (published in a magazine, as a clean copy, in a book), those that were verifiably created or published after 31 July 1946 will not be considered for the base text”, “If a clean copy or a magazine copy of a poem is available, and it appears to be the last variant in its chronology before the contest’s submission deadline and it shows a new stage in the poem’s development (or confirms a previous genetic layer in the autograph), it will be accepted as the base text”, etc. This way, the set of rules gradually grew throughout the reconstruction process, to cover anything from simple cases to more complex ones.
24A different approach to stabilizing the wording of the poems resulted in several different groups of poems. The solution was clear if the poem was only available in one clean-copy variant in the manuscript notebook (group A) or if the poem was available in a clean copy while the other variants came from a time period after the submission deadline for the literary contest (B). A more difficult situation arose when stabilizing the texts of poems where the original clean copy in the manuscript notebook included new genetic layers whose date of origin was difficult to determine and/or the poem had several variants (whose date of origin was sometimes difficult to determine too).
25Therefore, group C consisted of poems whose only available variant came from the manuscript notebook, which included further genetic layers whose date of origin was difficult to determine. Group D consisted of poems with variants from the manuscript notebook, which included further genetic layers whose date of origin was difficult to determine, and other variants that verifiably came from a time period after the submission deadline for the literary contest. In the case of groups C and D, the last genetic layer of the “notebook” poem was extracted.
- 11 Clean copies were mostly preserved in magazine archives.
26In the case of the poem Exkluzívna [Exclusive] (the only poem in group E), the new genetic layer was removed because it was most likely added to the manuscript notebook after the contest deadline. In other cases, copies of the poems from magazines (F) or clean copies (G)11 were used as the source because they captured the last stage in the development of these poems before the contest deadline. The gaps caused by missing sources, which brought about an undecidable situation (H), were then either filled by the editor’s subjective decisions — as was the case with the poems Koncentrácia [Concentration] and Rovnováha [Balance] — or the editor applied the unverifiable assumption that the transformations were added to the manuscript after a copy of the poem had been sent to the magazine (which probably occurred after the submission deadline). In these two cases, the wording of the poems was “cleared” of the new genetic layers that had been added to the clean copy. Finally, after a complete form of the Ruža collection was stabilized, the texts underwent linguistic proofreading, balancing the pros and cons of Slovak editorial tradition.
27Naturally, this editorial construct has its pitfalls. These primarily arise in those places on which the previous parts of this text have focused: from a composition perspective, poems from the Cesty poetry cycle were problematic (Údel, Hmla, Rispetti and Trýzeň), and from the perspective of stabilization, most issues arose with those poems that either contained new genetic layers in the manuscript notebook or they had several variants (especially if it was difficult to determine the date when they were written). It should also be noted that the preserved poem variants do not necessarily reflect the variants that were actually submitted for the literary contest since the author may have reopened the writing process when copying the poems to the contest submission.
- 12 The manuscript of the poem Povojnová [A Post-War Poem] also included an unclear reading, but a clea (...)
28Certain questions from the reconstruction process can be asked again: Why do the first and second poems in the Cesty poetry cycle (Údel — Kohosi mi to pripomína) have such a long time gap between each other (15 August 1943 — 28 February 1944), while a similar time gap is not present between any other poems in the cycle? Why does the second poem titled Údel break the chronological order, which is in conflict with the rest of the whole? Is the chronological principle in the Cesty poetry cycle a sufficiently important cardinal rule for it to be used for the selection of the poems Hmla, Rispetti and Trýzeň (as well as the order of both poems titled Údel)? Is it possible that the Ruža collection, as submitted for the competition, contained a different poem titled Údel that was not preserved in the manuscript notebooks for reasons unknown (a question which could also be applied to the other poem names)? Questions could also be raised in relation to the poems included in the Appendix. Is it possible that some of them are more suitable for the collection than the ones that have been chosen? And based on what criterion? Was a suitable approach chosen for the stabilization of the poems? A problem that remains unresolved is the unclear reading of two poems: Teplúčko [Warmth] and Glorifikácia [Glorification].12
29If we accept this reconstruction of the collection Ruža, we can relate it to his subsequent work. Surprisingly, not a single poem from Ruža appeared in Miháliks debut collection Anjeli. However, there are connections in Ruža to the forthcoming Anjeli through angelic motifs inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke. In the collection Ruža, there are poems that later, often after significant revisions related to Miháliks "conversion" from Catholicism to communism, appeared in other poetry collections. In his second collection Plebejská košeľa (1950), he included three poems, one poem in Neumriem na slame [I Will Not Die on Straw] (1955), twelve poems in Sonety pre tvoju samotu [Sonnets for Your Loneliness] (1966), and one poem in Rodisko [Birthplace] (1996). Eleven more poems were gradually published in selected writings or collected works. The remaining twenty-nine poems from Ruža either remained scattered in magazines (thirteen poems were published in magazines before the competition deadline) or simply stayed in manuscript form and have not been published yet (twenty-three poems have not been published so far).
30In the collection Ruža, Vojtech Mihálik presented himself in a wide range of poetic positions, both in terms of form (sonnet, rispetto, regular stanzaic structures, unrhymed poems, Claudelian verse, verse with relaxed syllabic structure, etc.) and themes (love, anti-war sentiments, religious themes, social emphasis, reflection on artistic creation, motifs of death, and more). The subsequent collection Anjeli is characterized by a greater thematic concentration on the spiritual mastery of the world, as well as the tension between the transcendent and earthly realms. In this sense, it appears as a carefully composed selection from a large corpus of Miháliks early poems.
31The shift from predominantly spiritual perception of the world to a focus on social and anti-war themes in the second collection, Plebejská košeľa, was often mistakenly interpreted as Miháliks transition to socialist realism. This deep discrepancy arose from the absolutization of the spiritual pole of Miháliks work in light of his debut collection Anjeli, which was a deliberately assembled selection that represents only a fraction of his rich corpus of early poems. Thus, the collection Ruža provides significant testimony to Miháliks poetic development, the diverse nature of his early poetic works, and the different strategies employed in composing collections (thematic dispersion vs. thematic concentration).
32In the book edition of the work, its diachronic dimension plays a lesser role. In a way, the editorial construct of Vojtech Mihálik’s collection Ruža is an openly editorial interpretation of the documents comprising or “surrounding” the work. However, as an interpretation, it relies on detailed knowledge of the relevant textual documents. Of course, the demands on the editor’s research activities are by no means lowered. However, due to the nature of these activities, at certain moments during the reconstruction, the lack of evidence meant that subjective editorial decisions were unavoidable. A suitable solution in cases like this is to create a digital edition that offers an opportunity to study the editor’s process or even compose the collection anew. Therefore, when selecting a suitable publication platform and finding a suitable structure for the materials associated with the Ruža collection, it first needs to be answered how to present the collection’s reconstruction to readers so that they are not just relying on its metatextual scholarly description. Digital technology makes it possible to provide readers with all the preserved base sources “surrounding” the collection, allowing them to follow the dynamics of individual texts and verify the editor’s work.
33A digital edition of Ruža would present the processes leading up to the collection’s composition, and, for the period after 1946, it would present the scattered “fates” of individual poems after Vojtech Mihálik removed the collection from his plans. There is tension between the print and digital editions since they have opposing goals: the goal of the reconstruction is to use this dynamic material to create a static form, so the reconstruction goes against the tendency of capturing a dynamic text. It actually strives to “freeze” this movement at a specific moment so that the readers of the book edition can be presented with a stable composition of Ruža. On the other hand, the digital edition can present the dynamic constitutive process of reconstructing the collection. The things that are fixed in the book edition are set into motion by the digital one, which questions non-authoritative elements.
34The shift to the digital environment is also associated with a paradigm shift: the reader — to a certain degree passive against textual reliability and textual variability — becomes an active user (whether as an expert or a layperson). As a result of his scholarly activity, the editor presents readers with the proposed form of the collection, which is, naturally, justified through scholarly research. However, readers have the option to inspect it and ultimately reconstruct it anew. It is up to the readers to decide whether they will accept the presented form of the collection or not. They have the option to review the work presented by the editor since they have almost all the relevant materials at their disposal — they need not rely on mere references to the materials or bibliographic citations; the availability of texts means that readers are not dependent on blindly trusting the editor’s narrative.
35Making the collection available in a digital environment enables users to work with its form with flexibility. In a way, this allows users to assume the editor’s perspective: it reveals the process of stabilizing the collection, it offers a choice between several poem alternatives, it allows users to explore poem variants and genetic layers, while also enabling them to follow the history of the poems reaching beyond the Ruža collection. The material that the editor had used to structure the print edition, including the inevitable losses, can now be organized in the user interface of the digital environment in a new and more extensive fashion.
- 13 This edition meets the attributes that Patrick Sahle lists in his definition of a scholarly digital (...)
- 14 Here it needs to be noted that the editor’s description of his approach to the reconstruction, toge (...)
36The digital edition of Vojtech Mihálik: Ruža is structured around two principal items in its main menu.13 The main item is titled EDITION and the other is titled The reconstruction of the collection. After choosing the latter item of the main menu, the application gradually guides users through the reconstruction of the Ruža collection (see Fig. 2). By doing so, the application challenges users to be active. In an interactive way, the application offers users the option to try an alternative reconstruction of the Ruža collection. First, the users are provided with a global description of the topic in question, in which they acquaint themselves with the sources used for the reconstruction, the historical contours of the period when the collection was created, the method used to determine the form of the collection, the two levels of reconstruction (the selection of texts, the selection of wordings), and the above-mentioned principles of text stabilization, as well as the user manual. Users can then use this information to form their own approach to the reconstruction process.14
Figure 2: Digital edition of Ruža.
CC-BY the author.
37In the following step, the user enters a two-step selection mode, where they select poems using the list and then choose their wordings. The instructions in the application guide the user through activities that follow the process through which the editor stabilized the wordings of the texts in the collection. The user has access to all the information that the editor had at his disposal, which they can use to make their own choices.
38On this level, the user first gets acquainted with the list of poems and its disputed elements. For each title in the list, the user gets a relevant description that should help them make a choice (the description is partially formalized to make it easier for the user to navigate it). The user can decide to act in accordance with the list and reject a poem, but they may also decide to include it in the reconstruction even though it is crossed out in the list (the option to “Include despite being crossed out”). Similarly, poems made uncertain by one or several question marks can be kept in the collection or omitted from it (the option to “Omit from the Ruža collection”). The user can also make a variety of decisions in regard to the other problematic poems (Údel, Hmla, Rispetti, Trýzeň): they can choose a different approach than the editor when determining the order of the two poems titled Údel, they can select any number of the nine available rispetti (0–9), etc. The description indicates relationships between individual poems and relevant data that the user needs to make their decision.
39After a specific poem has been chosen, the user can explore the different variants that the editor worked with before settling on a wording for the edition, as well as the options that the editor considered when composing the collection (see Fig. 3). Thus, for each poem, the user is provided with a description of its editorial stabilization, its relevant variants and a parallel view function. In addition to the information provided by the editor, the user can also support their decision through an exploration of the poem’s genesis and the provided facsimile. Since the application also serves an archival purpose, the presented poems are diplomatic copies. For each variant that is based on an autograph, the edition also includes a facsimile or a linear transcription (a transcription that preserves the original grammar and spelling and interprets the chronological order of the crossed-out and newly written text, but does not record the position of this transformative input or newly written segment); the deleted and added genetic layers are transcribed using special symbols. For their own reconstruction, the user can select one of the variants available in the transcription (including potential modifications) or diplomatic copy (without any changes), or they can make use of the “Edit” option to modify the text at their own discretion. The user can make interventions, manually extract a certain layer, or do a linguistic update of the text (variations in the spelling, a punctuation update, etc.).
Figure 3: The poem Vojna [War] in the digital edition of Ruža.
CC-BY the author.
40The user can explore all the possibilities of the Ruža collection and even combine various wordings. They can go through the individual levels of a poem’s reconstruction (macrocomposition, microcomposition) until the poem reaches a certain form and is saved into the database used for the user’s own reconstruction of the collection. If at some point the user wishes to review their selection, they can either clear the entire database or delete their choice of a specific poem variant. The user can generate a PDF document of the reconstructed collection at any point, either while the reconstruction process is still open or at the end, when a choice has been made from all the available options and the reconstruction process has finished.
- 15 For instance, the clean-copy version of the poem Povojnová that Vojtech Mihálik likely submitted to (...)
41Even though this paper presents two ways of presenting Vojtech Mihálik’s lost and reconstructed collection Ruža, it needs to be noted once again that even if all possible combinations of the reconstruction are exhausted, it is still possible that the process will not yield the correct combination — a version of the collection identical to the one that the author submitted for the literary contest organized by the Tranoscius publishing house. When copying the text of the collection for the contest submission, the author may have transformed it on several levels, including both its microcomposition and its macrocomposition. It is possible that these changes were not retroactively incorporated in either the list of poems (which appears less likely) or the wordings of poems as captured in the author’s manuscript notebooks. Therefore, it is possible that some changes are not captured in any of the preserved sources. There are several pieces of evidence for this.15
42First of all, it is important to acknowledge the editor’s share in the end product, as well as the transparency of his work. When comparing the reconstructed collection to its lost historical version, Ruža, in its reconstructed form, can serve as an eclectic edition of the collection. The degree to which the editor’s construct “overlaps” with its historical records could only be verified if the version submitted for the contest was found. Despite these shortcomings, the digital edition provides perhaps the best answer to the unclear form of the Ruža collection, although so far it can only be presented as an editorial construct. The construct itself is a compromise made with the intention of presenting a stabilized version of the collection to general readers. The reconstruction of this “lost” collection and the literary and historical interpretation of Vojtech Mihálik’s work associated with it, bring new possibilities for interpreting the poet’s personality in relation to the further genesis of his work.