Ilona: My Life With the Bard - Tapa blanda

Fiction. Women's Studies. Translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. ILONA: MY LIFE WITH THE BARD is a fictionalized biography of Ilona Nováková (1856- 1932), wife of Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (1849-1921), one of Slovakia's most revered poets. By reconstructing the minutiae of Ilona's everyday domestic routines and envisioning her thought processes, Jana Juránová paints a vivid and subtly ironic portrait of a woman who spent her life in the shadow of her husband. Juránová debunks the myth of the great artist, showing instead a vain and self-centred man, unwilling to take criticism and oblivious of his wife's needs. Wittily recreating or imagining Hviezdoslav's real-life encounters with fellow writers and literary scholars—based on careful research in historical and literary sources—Jana Juránová weaves a rich tapestry of cultural, social and political life in fin-de-siècle Slovakia.

"Beginning in reverie and a nostalgic glance back at the protagonist's early life and dreams, Jana Juránová's ILONA: MY LIFE WITH THE BARD subtly shifts to a tone of gentle and increasingly piercing irony towards Slovakia's national poet, with moments of almost nightmarish confinement, as it becomes clear that there was a heartlessness at the very heart of the burgeoning national liberation movements taking place throughout Central Europe, for they blatantly didn't include half of the people they claimed to unshackle. Yet Ilona's tenderness toward her husband, the loving eye with which she views the surrounding landscape and her determined if often uncertain attempts to insist on the significance of her life keep bitterness at bay."—Michael Stein