Andrej Žarnov

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Andrej Žarnov (born November 19, 1903 in Kuklov , Austria-Hungary ; died March 16, 1982 in Poughkeepsie , USA ) was the literary pseudonym of the Slovak physician František Šubík .

Life

František Šubík

František Šubík attended grammar school in Trnava and studied medicine at the University of Bratislava , which in 1939 appointed him professor of pathology. He published regularly in medical journals.

Šubík's signature on the medical report.

In the Slovak State established in 1939 , he became a senior public health officer. In 1940 he was appointed to the Slovak State Council, an advisory body, by President Jozef Tiso , and became head of the health authority.

When the German Foreign Ministry asked the Slovak government in April 1943 to send a Slovak member to the International Medical Commission for the autopsy of the victims of the Katyn massacre , Šubík was named. The commission worked in Katyn from April 28-30, 1943 and then presented its report to Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti in Berlin. After his return to Bratislava, he gave a lecture on his observations to medical professors and officials of his authority and highlighted the Soviet perpetrators in Katyn.

When Slovakia was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, Šubík fled to the German Empire . He was interned in the American zone of occupation and extradited to the re-established Czechoslovakia . He was sentenced to two years in prison for collaboration. According to his own account, his wife and friends raised money to bribe the judge to give him a mild sentence. After he was detained, he was only allowed to practice as a country doctor . He was under the control of the secret police, who kept arresting him for several days or even several weeks. He was no longer allowed to publish and his works were removed from public libraries.

With the financial help of his friend and former university colleague Univ. Prof. Dr. Ján Fridrichovský fled to Austria with his family in 1952 under extremely dramatic circumstances . In the US Embassy in Vienna he wrote a report for the Madden Commission of the US Senate , which was supposed to investigate the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre. Šubík came to the USA via Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany, where he settled as a doctor in Poughkeepsie in New York State and lived until his death in 1982.

Šubík was rehabilitated in Slovakia in 1999 and made an honorary citizen of Trnava. The Polish documentary filmmaker Grażyna Czermińska interviewed historians, relatives and acquaintances of Šubík for her film “Dedicating a Life to Truth” (2014) through the Katyn International Medical Commission .

Andrej Žarnov

Andrej Žarnov published five volumes of realistic and political poems full of patriotic pathos between 1925 and 1941. According to Sabine Witt, he was not only a pathologist as a doctor, but pathology in the sense of pathos and logos was also a guideline for him in his literature.

In 1925, Žarnov positioned himself in terms of national politics with his first volume of poetry "Stráž pri Morave", which came out again in 1940 and this time in full under the title Štít . The volume of poetry “Wacht an der March” was published by the publishing house of the party newspaper Slovák of the Hlinkas Slovak People's Party, edited by Karol Sidor . A large part of the poems had already appeared in the party newspaper in March and April 1925 and, in the run-up to the Czechoslovak parliamentary elections in 1925, took a clear stand in favor of the Slovaks' aspirations for autonomy vis-à-vis the Czechs: On the border river March , the simple Slovak peasants are supposed to push back the Czech capitalists and the invasion of the Fend off Czechoslovakism in Slovakia, which was declared a state doctrine in Czechoslovakia . The fight against the enemies of the Slovak nation was interpreted and nobilized by Žarnov in a mixture of Christian narrative and national symbolism with the help of Christian salvation history. In the fight against the “Slovak Czechoslovaks” Žarnov also made use of anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Before the book of poems was published, the Czechoslovak state censorship authority intervened and ensured that entire passages were deleted. When printing, the censorship cuts were made recognizable by omissions and the comment “Cenzurované” (censored), but were also recognizable for the partisans of the “Ludaken”. The massive illegal distribution of the poems made known Žarnov, who from then on became an authority as a political intellectual without directly interfering in the political events in Czechoslovakia. In 1926 he accompanied Andrej Hlinka as a representative of the Central Association of the Catholic Slovak Student Union on a trip to the USA. In 1934, Žarnov received the “Štefánikovu cenu” state prize in Czechoslovakia for the volume of poetry “Hlas krvi” [The Voice of the Blood].

Žarnov turned to the Slovak national renewal in his poems written from 1929. He described this using Christian metaphors in a return to a blood and soil agricultural society in which the religious division into Catholics and Protestants, the dichotomies of town and country and those in society could be dissolved. The actual diversity of languages ​​and religions was ignored by him in his ideal image of a pure Slovak and Catholic peasantry. He formulated the Slovak question of autonomy in a thoroughly combative and bloodthirsty language. In 2015, Sabine Witt therefore doubted Julius Pašteka's statement that Žarnov was in the “tradition of Christian-humanistic thinking”.

In 1936 Žarnov published an anthology of Polish poets. In the selection, the Christian-national theme played the overriding role. It was preceded by the Oda do Młodości by Adam Mickiewicz , whose translation at the time was a focal point of the emerging Slovak national literature as early as the 19th century. The Polish Literature Academy awarded him the “Srebrny Wawrzyn” (Silver Laurel) literary prize for the dissemination of Polish literature. In the years that followed, Žarnov also translated from Polish, for example pieces by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Zygmunt Krasiński 's verse drama The ungodly Comedy . In 1979 he translated a volume of poems by Cardinal Wojtyła , who wrote under a pseudonym, into Slovak without this book being able to be distributed in Czechoslovakia. In 1980 he presented a copy of this volume to Pope John Paul II at an audience for Catholic intellectuals from Slovak emigration in the Vatican .

In the Slovak state founded in 1939, Žarnov immediately received the State Prize in 1940 for the volume of poetry Štít ( shield, tank ). The volume, which was reissued after 1925, also contained poems from 1936 that were intended to support the state-building with national symbolism, which had now finally been realized. Among them a poem about the place Šurany , which fell to Hungary in 1938 as a result of the Vienna arbitration award and in which a Slovak woman was shot by Hungarian gendarmes shortly afterwards, and the poem “Devín” about the border castle Devín, which has become a national symbol of the Slovaks near Bratislava, which had now fallen to the German Empire.

Žarnov only published translations in the post-war period. In old age he began to translate Dante's Divine Comedy and was able to publish the first part.

Aftermath

As a Catholic nationalist author, Žarnov was taboo in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. There are no entries about him in the Czechoslovak reference works from this period. After the political change of 1989 (" Velvet Revolution )" and the second founding of Slovakia in 1993, Slovak literary scholars began to be interested in him. Žarnov is treated by them as an author of the interwar period and the Slovak state, as well as an author of emigration.

In the selection of poems "Nedopoviem slovom ...", published in 2003, the publisher did not include the poems with a pronounced political reference from the volume Štít , they are: "Traitors", "Deployment of the Living", "Farmer's House", "My Home" , “Home” and “Slovak Morning”, but they are part of the complete edition published by Julius Pašteka in 2007.

Works

  • Stráž pri Morave: Verše . Bratislava: Unia, 1925 [The Watch on the March]
  • Brázda cez úhory . 1929. [Furrow through the wasteland]
  • Hlas krvi . Trnava, 1932. [The voice of the blood]
  • Štít . Bratislava: Ján Horáček, 1940 [shield / tank]
  • Mŕtvy . Bratislava: Elánu, 1941 [He is dead / The dead]
  • Presievač piesku: poézia . 1978. Martin: Vyd-vo Matice slovenskej, 1993
  • Nedopoviem slovom… Výber z básnickej tvorby . Martin 2003 [I can't say it in words. Selection from the poetic work]
  • Julius Pašteka (Ed.): Môj domov jediný . Prešov: Vyd-vo Michala Vaška, 2007 [My only home]

Translations

  • U polských básnikov . Turč. Sv. Mart., 1936 [Among the Polish poets. Translations]
  • Zygmunt Krasiński: Nebožská komedie Turčiansky Sv. Martin: Matica slovenská, 1943 [ The ungodly comedy , verse drama]
  • Edward Francis Murphy: Hries̆nica z Magdaly: romăn . Trnave: Spolok sv. Vojtecha, 1948
  • Sophocles : Antigona . Turčiansky Sv. Martin: Matica slovenská, 1940
  • Adam Mickiewicz: Poézia . Trnava: Spolok sv. Vojtecha, 1948
  • Jan Kasprowicz : Hymny . Trnava: Spolok sv. Vijtecha, 1949
  • Oscar Wilde : Väzenská balada . Rím: Slovenský Ústav sv. Cyrila a Metoda, 1976. [ The Ballad of Reading Gaol ]
  • Andrzej Jawien: Profily: výber z básni . Rím: Slov. ústav sv. Cyrila a Metoda, 1979
  • Dante: Inferno . Translation with Mikuláš Pažítka . Cambridge, Ont. : Dobrá kniha, 1978

literature

  • Sabine Witt: Nationalist intellectuals in Slovakia 1918–1945: Cultural practice between sacralization and secularization . Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015
  • Jozef M. Rydlo: Andrej Žarnov (1903–1982): zborník o živote a diele univerzitného profesora MUDr. Františka Šubíka . Bratislava: Libri Historiae, 2008 ISBN 978-80-89348-00-8
  • Margita Kániková: V znamesí púpavy: fragmenty zo života básnika Andreja Žarnova . Bratislava: Vydavatelʹstvo Spolku slovenských spisovatelʹov., 2010
  • Július Pašteka; Jozef M Rydlo; Karol Petrovský: Andrej Žarnov: výberová personálna bibliografia: úvahy o diele . Bratislava: Univerzitná knižnica v Bratislave, 2000

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sabine Witt: Nationalist Intellectuals in Slovakia 1918–1945 , 2015, p. 325
  2. ↑ It is unclear whether Šubík can be seen in one of the existing group photos. Confusion is also possible. The article about František Šubík in the Russian Wikipedia shows a portrait photo , probably not in the public domain .
  3. ^ Report - Information on the Katyn Forest Incident US National Archives NARA.
  4. ↑ Margita Kániková: V Znamení púpavy. Fragmenty zo života básnika Andrej Žarnova . Bratislava 2010, p. 8.
  5. ↑ Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg: Hamburg Institute for Social Research , 2015, p. 212
  6. ↑ Mecislav Borák, Zlocin v Katyni a jeho ceské a slovenské souvislosti, in: Evropa mezi Nemeckem a Ruskem. Sborník prací k sedmdesátinám Jaroslava Valenty. Eds. M. Šesták and E. Vorácek. Prague 2000, p. 512.
  7. ^ Report - Information on the Katyn Forest Incident, 05/01/1952 image 10, US National Archives NARA.
  8. ↑ Mecislav Borák, Zlocin v Katyni a jeho ceské a slovenské souvislosti, in: Evropa mezi Nemeckem a Ruskem. Sborník prací k sedmdesátinám Jaroslava Valenty. Eds. M. Šesták and E. Vorácek. Prague 2000, p. 514.
  9. ^ Report - Katyn Forest Incident, 05/22/1952 images 3, 8, US National Archives NARA.
  10. ↑ Taký bol Andrej Žarnov http://nasatrnava.sme.sk , November 18, 2008.
  11. ↑ Poświęcając życie prawdzie , filmpolski.pl ( Lodz Film School )
  12. ↑ The pseudonym "Žarnov" means "millstone" in German.
  13. ↑ a b c d e f Sabine Witt: Nationalist Intellectuals in Slovakia 1918–1945 , 2015, pp. 307–333
  14. ↑ a b Sabine Witt: Nationalist Intellectuals in Slovakia 1918–1945 , 2015, pp. 349–352
  15. ↑ Sabine Witt: Nationalist Intellectuals in Slovakia 1918–1945 , 2015, pp. 362–366. Execution of the blood sacrifice
  16. ↑ Sabine Witt: Nationalist Intellectuals in Slovakia 1918–1945 , 2015, p. 351
  17. ↑ Margita Kániková: V Znamení púpavy. Fragmenty zo života básnika Andrej Žarnova . Bratislava 2010, p. 70.
  18. ↑ photos of this audience which appears in Rome Slovak magazine "Slovenské hlasy for Rima" published on March 3, 1980th
  19. ↑ a b c d Sabine Witt: Nationalist Intellectuals in Slovakia 1918–1945 , 2015, pp. 370–374
personal data
SURNAME Žarnov, Andrej
ALTERNATIVE NAMES František Šubík
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Slovak writer and medic
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Kuklov
DATE OF DEATH March 16, 1982
Place of death Poughkeepsie