Borodáč’s Chlapci na Stráži

Abstract

Abstract This study deals with the production of the play Chlapci na stráži [Boys on Guard], which was awarded in a competition organized on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1938. It was written by Ján Borodáč, the artistic director of the Drama Company of the Slovak National Theatre under the pseudonym of Ján Debnár. By the time it was premiered on 29 October 1939, there had been significant political changes. Following the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia, based on the decision of the prime ministers of France, Great Britain, Italy and Germany, had lost ethnically mixed Czech-German borderlands, President Eduard Beneš had offered his resignation and had gone into exile, and Slovakia had got the autonomy it was promised by the Pittsburgh Agreement (an obligation that had gone unfulfilled for long). The play which was supposed to celebrate the anniversary of the Czechoslovak Republic paradoxically acquired a new meaning under the pressure of these changes - it celebrated the autonomy and called for a defiance of revisionist pressures from Horthy’s Hungary.