Ľubica Schmarcová
Romantics, messianists and the regenerative potential of disaster
Once the French Revolution had established an atmosphere that encouraged the long-term reconstruction of society and a ''new beginning'', numerous cultural movements took up this idea. The topos of a ''new start'' became a fixed part of Romantic ideology, in its radical form becoming a central expectation of the messianic school of Slovak Romanticism. However, the changes anticipated by poets of messianic vision were to be preceded by a historic catastrophe, a cataclysm overturning the social system and reconstructing the old order of the world. This paper based on examples from work by Romantic messianist Samo Bohdan Hroboň indicates the ways in which the historic catastrophe motif was poetically modelled and its potential to regenerate the mortified Slav world and to establish a ''golden age of the Slavs'' was highlighted.
design by Bedřich Vémola
