The Eschatological Visions ofthe World in Russian and Slovak Literatures of the Late 19'h and the Early 20'h Centuries (Sectarianism in Andrei Bely' s and Svetozár Hurban Vajanský' s Works)

Using the theme of sectarianism, the paper compares the works written by Russian representative of Symbolism Andrei Bely (1880 – 1934) and Slovak Realist writer Svetozár Hurban Vajanský (1847 – 1916) – namely the novels The Silver Dove (1909) and The Root and The Shoots (1895-6). Russian literary science has been dealing with sectarianism in Bely´s work in the last few years but the sectarian motifs in Vajanský´s works have not been particularly examined. Interliterary comparison brings the corpus of Slovak literary works written in the late 19th century into the European context. The authors from the opposite extremes of the turn of the two centuries are related by the origin of their thinking – the ideas of Russian slavophiles. What is important are the efforts made to revive the novel as a genre in a modern manner: A. Bely achieved a worldwide succes and S. H. Vajanský did as well in Slovak literature, where he forged the „novel situation“. Both of the works compared are critical of the social system, the dysfunctional elites of the society and challenge the official church. Sectarianism in Bely´s and Vajanský´s works is seen here in the wider context of the „dark“ world reflected on in literary Modernism. Bely used this phenomenon to build up his novel from within as a part of his artistic and philosophical pursuit in the context of Russian Modern. Sectarianism in the work by Vajanský, who used it as one of the motifs, was the result of finding new themes and phenomena which would make it possible to define the nature of the contemporary life of Slovak society.