„...radosť z roboty samej a vedomie, že prácou pre Slovensko slúžili sme republike.“ K slovenskému pôsobeniu Františka Heřmanského z hľadiska česko-slovenských medzijazykových a medziliterárnych vzťahov

Abstract

The paper focuses on the personality of the Czech secondary school teacher František Heřmanský (1887–1966) and his interwar activities in Slovakia concerning a broad sphere of education and culture. Several lines of his activity can be seen as part of the contemporary cultural policy in the field of Czech-Slovak interlingual and interliterary relations, where special attention was paid to the simultaneous development of Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech bilingualism and biliterarism. F. Heřmanský deserves special attention as the author of textbooks for both the Czech and Slovak schools. Being a classical philologist, he compiled Latin grammars and readers. On the other hand, he prepared multiple series of Slovak literary readers for secondary and grammar schools, thereby contributing to the creation of the Slovak and Czechoslovak literary canon and formation of collective identity in the First Czechoslovak Republic. His contribution in this regard has not yet been analysed. One line of his activity connected with his involvement in multi focused work of the Slovak cultural institution Matica slovenská was bound up with the need to provide the Slovak and Czech (Czechoslovak) education system with enough Slovak literary work. F. Heřmanský’s contribution to the cultivation of Czech-Slovak biliteracy is associated with the literary series Čítanie študujúcej mládeže [Reading for young students], intended primarily for Slovak students and, to some extent, also for Czech students. In the course of this work, F. Heřmanský became a textual lexicographer authoring Slovak-Czech glossaries that accompanied Slovak literary texts to help the Czech reader understand unfamiliar expressions. Appended bilingual glossaries represent a remarkable part of the Czech-Slovak interlingual and interliterary context of the time. F. Heřmanský also produced Czech-Slovak glossaries for his literary readers to help Slovak students read Czech texts. His Slovak textbooks, a wide range of his other texts written in Slovak and his Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak glossaries as well as translations (from Slovak into Czech and vice versa) demonstrate that F. Heřmanský was a distinctive bilingual and biliterary author. Through his translation activity he entered the controversial sphere of Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech mutual translation. His bilingual competence found its specific expression in the translation of Jiří Polívka’s important scholarly work Súpis slovenských rozprávok [Survey of Slovak fairy tales] (1923–1931) from Czech into Slovak and later in his literary translations of Ladislav Nádaši-Jégé’s works from Slovak into Czech. His other linguistic and literary activities included involvement in the preparation and publication of the official Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu [Slovak Spelling Rules] (1931), for which he prepared the first draft of the spelling dictionary. A closer look at the interwar work of F. Heřmanský, which has not yet received due attention, reveals the breadth of the cultural challenges as well as the political and ideological tensions and contradictions in the Czech-Slovak context of the time. This paper is framed by substantial excerpts from Česi a Slováci [Czechs and Slovaks], Heřmanský’s 1922 programmatic journalistic text, which illustrates his vision of the activities of Czechs in Slovakia and mutually beneficial Czech-Slovak relations.