The foreign atmosphere of Africa as part of magical expression in the fiction of Marek Vadas

Abstract

The prosaist Marek Vadas is a contemporary Slovak writer who has won several literary prizes. A unique part of his bibliography is represented by short stories inspired by African culture and environment. The main objective of this paper is to analyse via interpretation these stories and to prove the role of the African environment in the process of creating the magical as a quality of expression. Stories from the following collections are looked at: Liečiteľ, Čierne na čiernom, and Zlá štvrť. The methodological approach of the interpretation is based on the theory of František Miko and his system of expression categories. The portrayed image of Africa interpreted in this contribution proceeds from Vadas’s personal experience. We conclude that the unique African element in his work adds to the magical quality of expression, which is based on the coaction of several elements: different cultural experience, thematic scheme, blend of multiple qualities of expression and of compositional techniques. The final magical quality of expression represents the specificity of Vadas’s writing style.