"...the joy of the work itself and the knowledge that by working for Slovakia we have served the Republic." František Heřmanský's Slovak activities in the context of Czech-Slovak interlingual and interliterary relations
Abstract
The paper focuses on the personality of the Czech secondary school teacher František Heřmanský (1887-1966) and his interwar activities in Slovakia concerning a broad sphere of education and culture. Several lines of his activity can be seen as part of the contemporary cultural policy in the field of Czech-Slovak interlingual and interliterary relations, where special attention was paid to the simultaneous development of Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech bilingualism and biliterarism.
F. Heřmanský deserves special attention as the author of textbooks for both the Czech and Slovak schools.
Being a classical philologist, he compiled Latin grammars and readers. On the other hand, he prepared multiple series of Slovak literary readers for secondary and grammar schools, thereby contributing to the creation of the Slovak and Czechoslovak literary canon and formation of collective identity in the First Czechoslovak Republic.
One line of his activity connected with his involvement in multi focused work of the Slovak cultural institution Matica slovenská was bound up with the need to provide the Slovak and Czech (Czechoslovak) education system with enough Slovak literary work. In the course of this work, F.
Heřmanský became a textual lexicographer authoring Slovak-Czech glossaries that accompanied Slovak literary texts to help the Czech reader understand unfamiliar expressions. F.
Heřmanský also produced Czech-Slovak glossaries for his literary readers to help Slovak students read Czech texts. His Slovak textbooks, a wide range of his other texts written in Slovak and his Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak glossaries as well as translations (from Slovak into Czech and vice versa) demonstrate that F.
Heřmanský was a distinctive bilingual and biliterary author. His other linguistic and literary activities included involvement in the preparation and publication of the official Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu [Slovak Spelling Rules] (1931), for which he prepared the first draft of the spelling dictionary.
A closer look at the interwar work of F. Heřmanský, which has not yet received due attention, reveals the breadth of the cultural challenges as well as the political and ideological tensions and contradictions in the Czech-Slovak context of the time.