Marianna Koliová
Identity Issues in Daniel Šustek's Travelogues
In the context of the history of 19th-century Slovak literature, Daniel Šustek is a relatively unknown name, which is partly due to the fact that he wrote almost exclusively travelogues (The Craftsman's Journey to Paris; The Craftsman's Journey through Turkey and Egypt to the Holy Land; From the Craftsman's Journey through Asia; From the Craftsman's Journey to America). Overall, the genre of travelogue is characterised by a certain peripherality and borderline between documentary and fiction, with the literary canon usually including those authors who cultivated other literary genres and were able to write travel accounts alongside them. Despite the fact that Šustek did not pursue other literary genres, his travel prose makes for very engaging reading, even for today's reader. He was not a representative of the intelligentsia, for whom writing activity was typical, but a craftsman, a carpenter. Šustek's travel texts are an interesting object of interpretation in terms of the issue of identity. In his prose, the mode of travel writing intersects and permeates with the autobiographical mode, which is due to the fact that Šustek's travel experience was of a long-term nature (1864-1873). It always depends on the specific travel or communication situation whether Šustek defines himself in his texts socially/professionally as a carpenter, culturally and religiously as a European and Christian, ethnically as a Slovak, civically as a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, regionally as a person connected to the Horehronie or Tyrol region, and by marital status as an unmarried man. Of course, one cannot overlook the fact that the author of the travelogue is both a traveller and a narrator, which is necessarily connected with a certain amount of self-stylization and construction of identity in the process of narration, reproducing certain cultural patterns inherent in the period.
Keywords: Daniel Šustek - travelogue - autobiography - layered identity
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