POVEDAŤ VIAC (SEBA-KONŠTRUKCIA: PODOBA V. ŠIKULU V AUTOBIOGRAFICKÝCH TEXTOCH)

The study deals with the autobiographical writings by the Slovak prose writer Vincent Šikula. It tracks the development and the contemporary transformations of the author´s self-image from the beginning of his career as a writer in the 1960s until the end of his life in 2001. It builds on widely available sources, i.e. Šikula´s non-fiction writings of memoir nature, such as reflections on him and the others, biographical sketches, essays, the answers in interviews, articles and surveys and so on. The author approaches them as a Modern subjective and therefore biased representation. The individual phases of his creative life show that Šikula saw his past and present in different ways. The form of his self-presentation was defined by the inner, in the course of time changing motivations and ambitions that is the efforts to take a certain place in the contemporary literary and public cultural environment, as well as the outer conditions and constraints, which underwent changes, too. Šikula began to create his own „portrait of the artist“ meant for the public as early as he embarked on his career as a writer in the mid-1960s, then in the following two decades he presented his modified version adjusted to the times, and in the period of time after the year 1990 the image became somehow completed and after his death definite. However, none of the depictions of his life in any of the periods of time mentioned contradicts what he had said about himself previously or would say later, the individual versions of him did not rule out the others, although in each of them he placed weight on a different aspect of his writer life.