K POETIKE RANEJ PRÓZY MARGITY FIGULI

The article focuses on the poetics of Margita Figuli’s (1909 – 1995) early fiction – it provides interpretation and comparison of her prose works Mámivý dúšok ([Intoxicating sip] published in 1935 in a magazine) and Pokušenie ([Temptation] published in 1934 in a magazine and in 1937 as a book). Both texts are built on the contradiction between male and female characters, their inner conflict, tension between desire (emotion) and rational reasoning, carnality and eroticism, and the problem of distance and contact that leads to disillusionment. The composition of both novellas is enriched by the alternation of dialogical passages with narrative ones, the inclusion of dream motifs, ideas and memories as a form of escape from reality, and the use of a framing principle that makes the actual inner events fit into a recurrent and universal natural cycle. The paper attempts to identify the elements through which M. Figuli, at this stage in her career, drew on the poetics of modernism (Slovak modernism and the so-called second wave modernism) and the elements through which she anticipated the onset of naturism as a specific style that brought innovation into Slovak literary fiction at that time. In this way, the article accentuates poetological continuity in Slovak literature of the first half of the 20th century.