Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav


Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav was a Slovak poet, dramatist, translator, and for a short time, member of the Czechoslovak parliament. Originally, he wrote in a traditional style, but later became influenced by parnassism and modernism.

Name

He was born as Pavel Országh. His family name is Hungarian. Hviezdoslav was his pseudonym from 1875. His earlier pseudonym was Jozef Zbranský.

Life

Pavel Országh was born in Vyšný Kubín, Árva County, Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire. He was of noble origin. Hviezdoslav studied at grammar schools in Miskolc and Kežmarok in the Hungarian lutheran school. The young Országh became a Hungarian patriot. During this time he got acquainted with the poetry of Arany János and Petőfi Sándor and under their influence he started to write poems first in Hungarian, then from the mid-1870s in Slovakian. After his graduation in 1870, he continued his studies at the Law Academy of Prešov, where in 1871 he participated in the preparation of the Almanach Napred, which marked the beginning of a new literary generation in Slovak literature. Due to his contribution to this Almanac with several radical poems, however, he was ignored in the literary life of the country for the rest of the 1870s and couldn't get his works published. During this period, he pursued his law career in Dolný Kubín, but he also carried on with his literary work in his free time. He practiced as a lawyer between 1875 and 1899 in Námestovo, and then in Dolný Kubín again. In 1918, he became a member of the newly created Revolutionary National Assembly in Prague, and from 1919 to 1920, served as its representative. In 1919, he was chosen as the leader of the re-established Matica slovenská, a Slovak cultural institute founded in 1863, and closed as a result of Hungarian policy in 1875
In 1954, the Literary Museum of P. O. Hviezdoslav was established in Dolný Kubín. A festival of amateur poetry reciters named Hviezdoslav's Kubín has been held there since.
Minor planet 3980 is named Hviezdoslav.

Works

Hviezdoslav introduced the syllabic-tonic verse into Slovak poetry and became the leading representative of Slovak literary realism. His style is characterized by extensive use of self-coined words and expressions, making it difficult to translate his works into foreign languages.
His oeuvre constitutes some 12 volumes of original poetry and an additional 3 volumes of translations of classical authors. During his era, he was the poet laureate of the Slovak nation. To honor his 1905 translation, of The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách, he was elected a member of the Kisfaludy Society in 1912.

Collected works and selections

He began writing poetry – initially in Hungarian – while still attending grammar school ). His first poetry collection, the Básnické prviesienky Jozefa Zbranského, was published in 1868. It introduced the syllabic-tonic verse into Slovak literature.
An awakened national pride brought him to resolve to work in Slovak, but the inclination towards realism in his early poetry was met with aversion by the older generation.
Among the most important of his mature lyric cycles are:
The poet's epic compositions derive from his native Orava and from biblical topics, through which he commented allegorically on the situation of the Slovak nation:
Hviezdoslav was also a translator. He translated many works of such authors as Goethe, Schiller, Mickiewicz, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Słowacki, Arany, Petőfi, Lermontov and Madách. These translations were collected after his death into volumes 12 to 15 of The Collected Poetical Works of Hviezdoslav.