Chápanie slovenského národa a slovenských dejín v diele Jána Tibenského

(Understanding the Slovak Nation and Slovak History in the Work of Ján Tibenský)

Martin Homza

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HOMZA, Martin. Understanding the Slovak Nation and Slovak History in the Work of Ján Tibenský. In Historický zborník, Vol. 35, 2025, No. 1, pp. 39 – 52.

Abstract: The author examines the work of one of the most prominent Slovak historians of the twentieth century, Ján Tibenský. He focuses on Tibenský’s conceptual approach to interpreting Slovak history. His analysis draws primarily on three of Ján Tibenský's texts on the subject of Slovak history published between 1954 and 1971 in Historický časopis (Historical Journal). The selected texts reflect a gradual shift from a Marxist-Stalinist historian of the oppressed Slovak nation to a mature historian whose work came to be characterized by extensive factographic research across various archives in Slovakia and Central Europe – research that eventually surpassed all his prior communist methodological prejudice. The dominance of rich factography – although never personally acknowledged by Tibenský – ultimately led him to effectively abandon the originally Marxist philosophy view of Slovak history and to develop a distinctive chronology, methodology, and terminology for Slovak historical research. In this way, Ján Tibenský became, alongside Daniel Rapant and Ľubomír Lipták, one of the most significant Slovak historians of the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, whose work uniquely captured the complexities of Slovak history. Based on this individual approach to Slovak history, the author concludes the study by placing Tibenský within the Catholic wing of Slovak historiography. This categorization draws upon an analogy with Slovak novel classification proposed by literary historian Ján Števček in the late 1980s. According to this framework, the narrative techniques of selected Slovak authors differed from others by exhibiting a lower degree of ideological bias and respect for portraying the everyday contradictions in the reality of Slovak life. Števček termed such broader narrative approaches as “Catholic novels.”

Keywords: Ján Tibenský; Stalinist Concept of Nationality; Nationality; Nation; Slovaks; Feudalism; Modern Era; National Revival