At the peripheries of memory: (Non-)memory about the past of Slovak Hungarians in twenty-first-century Slovak literature

The aim of this article is to analyse the portrayal of Hungarians in the context of the Second World War in twenty-first-century Slovak literature on the example of the novels Stalo sa prveho septembra (alebo inokedy) (It happened on the first of September (or whenever) by Pavol Rankov (2008) and Nedelne sachy s Tisom (Sunday chess with Tiso) by Silvester Lavrik (2016). The article argues that the two novels demonstrate two types of forgetting described by Paul Connerton: "repressive erasure" and "forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity". I analyse how these types of forgetting functioned in Slovak society, and conclude that the question of the Hungarian minority is becoming less of a taboo in contemporary Slovak literature, even if it still remains at the peripheries of Slovak memory about the Second World War.