Image of a Russian Professor in Stanislav Rakъs’s The Eccentric University

Abstract

This article focuses on the image of the Russian professors in The Eccentric University (2008), a novel by Stanislav Rakús. Based on previous research, the author presents a short survey of Russian images in Slovak Literature in the late nineteenth — early twentieth-first centuries, whose peculiarities are rooted in the history of interaction between the two Slavic nations. Thus, the early twentieth century idealistic image of the Russian was built on the basis of Russian literature. The first images of Russians based on personal experience were created by Czechoslovak legionnaires as a result of interaction with Russians between 1917 and 1920, while after World War II, they were presented through a dichotomy “brother — suppressor”, to be changed into more dynamic ones by the early twenty-first century. The Eccentric University, which the author approaches from the perspective of the academic novel and part of Rakъs’s academic trilogy, enlarges the list of literary images of the Russians in Slovak literature. The author analyses images of Maria Petrovna Golovčikova, a female professor of Russian nineteenth-century literature, and Alexandr Kirillovič Ћuprej, a professor of Russian literature, both immigrant scholars at a Slovak university in the 1950s. The author maintains that through these images, Rakъs addresses not only Slovak Russophilic stereotypes historically embedded in nineteenth-century literary images of Russians, but also gender and immigrant stereotypes that circulate in contemporary Slovak culture. The author concludes that an ironic portrayal of Russian professors is directed at the cultural memory activation, which together with other features typical for both campus and academic novel adds to the new (Rakús’s) invariant of the “university novel”.