Slovak culture and literature after the Velvet Revolution of 1989

In this study we will focus on the connection of culture and art with historical and political processes in the twentieth century, which to a great extent affected developments in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the establishment of the independent Slovak Republic (1993). The complexity of Slovakia’s historical development provides sufficient discourses and ample artistic and literary works (of interest from a cultural point of view), which were the seismographs of this development, especially in the parallel culture, literature, and the visual (especially action) arts. We have tried, using specific works, to point out that free writers even under socialism were able to produce works that became a mirror of deviation and camouflage. The politics of the socialist system forced writers into internal emigration and onto the so-called “index” (blacklist), so that their works could not be published until after 1989. At the same time, we point out that some literary scholars – despite their own anchoring in solid academic institutions – respond to these publications and studies on the complex question of the existence of a parallel culture in a non-conceptual, ideological, and unscholar way.