Timrava, That Alluring Land: Slovak Stories by Timrava, trans. and ed. Norma L. Rudinsky (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 326 pp.
In all fairness, this should have been “Slovak Novels in English #1” (that honor went somewhat haphazardly to The Year of the Frog instead), because it is the very first work of Slovak literature in English that I ever read.
The year was 1998, and the discovery was online used booksellers. Those who came of age after the internet revolution and yet are bibliophiles cannot even fathom the limitations on voracious readers back then. We had what bookstores physically carried—and even if a well-curated collection went beyond the boilerplate bestsellers, there was only so much a Waldenbooks in the mall could stock, much less make a profit on selling. Libraries had more range, but inevitable limitations as well. I remember having heard of books that I knew I’d never find, or seeing “Also by this author” in beloved books and knowing it was a lost cause. Even used bookstores tended to focus on mass market paperbacks in high-volume genres like mystery or romance.
So really, you just can’t fathom what wonder opened up when you could type in a title and author—find the book—and buy it. As far as I can recall, my first online book purchases were the Green-Sky Trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (I’d only ever read the first volume in my school library) and the entire Graustark sequence (I’d read the first two but didn’t even know about the other four, all of which are lovingly detailed in my memoir).
Graustark curiosity satisfied, it occurred to me to wonder if there was real Slovak literature out there in English, and not just the Ruritanian fantasy of Graustark. Type in some key words and find: Timrava, That Alluring Land. Brandish that credit card and away you go!
So I got the book, I read it, and I had no idea what to do with it.
This may have been my first serious encounter with high realism. Timrava, the pen name of a Slovak woman with the given name of Božena Slančíková, wrote stories from the 1880s through the 1930s of miniaturist quality, closely observed, near to life, nothing overdrawn or overblown or shortened or heightened. The five short stories and one novella in this book are exceedingly detailed, conversation-heavy depictions of village life. I should not have found them perplexing at all, because I had unwittingly rendered the exact same level of detail and conversation in the letters that would a quarter-century later become the foundation of my aforementioned memoir. But memoir is not fiction, and Timrava’s fiction was not like any I’d read before.
Moreover, it is not the least bit romantic, as in idealized. When I read Timrava, I was still very much under the spell of Old World-Slovakia. It is much easier to be under the spell of the Old World if you’ve spent all your life in the anonymous New World. Timrava should leave readers in no doubt that village life has oppressions all its own. Who knows—that suffering may still be better than the extreme isolation of the hypermodern city. But it’s still suffering.
So, for instance, “The Assistant Teacher” is the first-person narrative of a young woman who is won over by an ugly schoolteacher precisely because of his abject refusal to pursue her. “Battle” also deals with shifting village romances, while “No Joy at All” catalogs the efforts of a widow to be united with her former sweetheart, now a widower himself, to no avail. “The Tapák Clan” features a disabled girl among the protagonists and explores the tension between peasants and progress.
To me the most perplexing of all was the titular “That Alluring Land,” which refers not to Slovakia, but to America! “So that alluring land crept into Jano’s thoughts again, the New World across the ocean, which gave a man everything good, and which could ease from his shoulders the pressing debt” (109). How disappointing for this American still pining for Slovakia to learn how much Slovaks pined for America—even though that is self-evidently the story of my own ancestors who heard the same call to the New World.
The novella that concludes the book, “Great War Heroes,” is an ironic anti-war story that starts with the enthusiasm of going off to fight and ends with the grief and despair over all the village’s men being killed. It also addresses the conflict between Magyar overlords and Slovak underlinings. Parts of that were so sensitive that censors deleted it from the published version; the notes were only discovered later in Timrava’s papers showing her original intention. It’s a good summary of both the author’s intention and what these stories did to me (albeit with some resistance on my part): dispelling illusions.
Speaking of which, I have now reached #42 in my project to read all Slovak novels in English, which has taken me over four years. I haven’t quite tracked down all the ones already translated, and I know that there are more coming down the pike. But it seems like a good time to stop. 42, as we all know, is the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
I feel reassured knowing that I cannot and will not exhaust Slovak literature in English. I started out this project thinking I would do exactly that long before I hit twenty. Now I’m more than twice that far along. It’s been a good run. May the tribe of Slovak authors translated into English increase!