LONG SLOVAK NINETEENTH CENTURY

The article approaches the phenomenon of Slovak literary Romanticism through the idea of the so-called "long 19(th) century", a longer perspective than the duration of the so-called national revival. The anti-modernist attitudes of a great part of the Slovak literary intelligentsia throughout the 19(th) century can be suspended in the cultural-historical or social-historical idea of modernization. With the hindsight of contemporary struggles between the empirical and constructivist historiography, Slovak Romanticism appears as a cultural initiative that combines the moment of rational evaluation of the socio-cultural situation of the Slovak national community in the middle of the 19(th) century with the constructivist (idealistic) moment. The various combinations of both moments lead in the Slovak Romantic literature to the creation of neo-mythological self-representations, which are discussed in the second part of the paper.