JESENSKY'S REALISM IN THE DEMOCRATS

Jesensky's Democrats is not a realistic work in the sense that it would provide an account of the outer phenomenal reality. Such a view of realism is generally accepted, though no doubt misleading. The novel The Democrats depicts the Slovak society in the 1930s. Time and history are related to the thematic layer of the literary work - the "real" thematic framework is usually considered the main indicator of the realistic character of artistic prose. The author of the study approaches the novel from the cognitivist perspective. Her aim is to create a certain foundation from which it would be possible to start the research of the so-called realism in modernism. Therefore, one should take seriously the arguments of cognitive science that the objectivist theory of meaning based on probabilistic conditions failed; that most of the terms are not classical (completely definable) but on the contrary, most of the every-day language is metaphorical. A rhetorical question may be asked: Is not the classical literary theoretical distinction between semantics and pragmatics useless, if it is obvious that in the human, and thus, also in the literary language, it is not possible to ignore the width and the depth of human experience?