Dominik Tatarka and His Journalist Dimension

The study focuses on the Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka and his aspect of journalism. Although he is primarily a personality who belongs to the artistic-literary space, he was also heavily involved as a journalist at one time. However, the recognition of this journalistic line remains in the background, while it had a societal impact and was a serious testimony of the writer’s turbulent opinion development, turns, and attitudes. The writer radically succumbed to the communist regime at some point in his life, but after realizing the destruction that the totalitarian regime was perpetrating, he subsequently radically moved away from these positions and became its loud critic. Naturally, these positions of opinion are also copied by his journalistic activity, the reflection of which, as we have already stated, remains somewhat in the background. The study therefore has the ambition to eliminate this deficit at least partially. Based on the research of collected journalistic texts and analytical probe into their semantic space, our goal is to make available the hitherto undisclosed semantic dimensions of his journalistic communications, put them in relationships and context and thus expand the portfolio of information about this distinctive, at that time key figure of the Slovak cultural space. With regard to the limited spatial possibilities of the contribution, we focus on Tatarka's journalistic activities in the period of the second half of the 1940s to approximately the first half of the 1950s. This is the period in which he manifested himself most strongly as a journalist and his activities in this direction took on serious social dimensions.The study aims to expand the scope of information about this prominent Slovak social and cultural figure and to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of him. Keywords: writer, journalist, communist regime, newspaper article, journalism, print media