No Justice, No Peace! Well, I Guess That Means No Peace Ľudovít Štúr and the Naïve Optimism of the Innocent Nineteenth Century C.S. Kraszewski I don’t remember the first time I read the ‘Journey through the Region of the Váh,’ but it certainly was a long time ago. At any rate, when first I did, my eyes passed over the following sentence (in which Ľudovít Štúr records his first impressions of the poet Jan Hollý) without resting upon them for more than the time it took to scan them: ‘The pleasant countenance and grey hair of this old man of fifty-six years lend him an especial charm that enchants the person who gazes upon him.’ But now… those same eyes stopped dead in their tracks. ‘Old man?!… fifty-six!?’ For I passed that milestone two years ago and… Oh well. What’s the use. I’m noting this down here not out of self-pity or vanity or anything of that sort. What really strikes me is how texts change over time, or at least the manner in which we read them does. We have a tendency to accept them, unthinkingly, like monuments carved in stone, as unchanging as the Discobolus, for example. After all, no one imagines that Myron’s athlete will ever complete his motion, fling the discus, and reach for something else, like a javelin or a baseball bat. Literature is the same, in a manner of speaking, of course. The manner in which Dostoevsky spins out Raskolnikov’s thoughts from the time we first meet him until he murders the old pawnbroker is so excruciatingly slow as we pass along Nevsky Prospekt with him — it takes a full 70 pages before the axe finally falls — that we’re almost fooled into hoping that maybe ‘this time’ he’ll turn away from the murder… But we know that this is impossible. Crime and Punishment does not change. But we do; the manner in which we read things changes as we change, due to our life experiences, due to the history that goes on around us, touching upon us, invading our consciousness, to a greater or lesser degree. INTRODUCTION
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