Maria Brzezina, Katerina Pösingerová
STYLIZATION STRATEGY IN IVAN OLBRACHT'S GOLET V ÚDOLÍ
Summary
Ivan Olbracht's fascination with Transcarpathian Ruthenia, incorporated into Czechoslovakia after World War I, found its literary expression in his short-story triptych Golet v údolí (1937). It shows a dramatic moment in the life of a group of poor chassids who live in the midst of the Ruthenians in a remote mountain village. While the Czech authorities step up their assimilatory pressure, Zionists organizations intensify their work aimed at getting the Jewish youth to leave for Palestine. Apart from enlivening the narration with a dash of local colour the finely-drawn stylization highlights the difficulties the chassids have in coping with the totally new situation.
The linguistic stylization of the narrative covers onomastics, lexis and phraseology. A Jewish style, whose dominant feature is the recurrence of Jewish words from the field of religion, constitutes the core component of the stylization. The second group of stylizants comes from politics, the third from every-day life. The Jewish stylization is, however, overlaid with Ruthene usage, a linguistic reflection of the penetration of Jewish culture by Ruthene elements (most conspicuously in the case of onomastics). Ultimately, it is the Ruthene stylization which determines the territorial and social framework of the story (by means of the 'husbandman's' onomastics and a range of local words referring to familiar items from the East Carpathian environment). Olbracht, it should be noted, not only mixed into his narrative handfuls of local-colour words but also a number of interesting sociolinguistic glosses and explanations.