A reflection on the correspondence between Milan Rúfus and Karol Nandrásky.
Letters have been preserved in which two university teachers, associate professor Milan Rúfus, literary scholar, poet, multiple-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Karol Nandrásky, professor of ancient covenant texts and longtime dean at the theological faculty, encouraged and admired each other. Both had once worked at Comenius University in Bratislava. The oldest letter from the preserved correspondence is from 1983. Yet their literary friendship began sometime in the 1960s. They did not visit each other, never saw each other, and did not meet in person. In a letter from June 1993, Milan Rúfus thanks him for a study on Martin Heidegger that Karol Nandrásky sent him, quote: “After a long time, again, I had the chance to experience what Halas called the ‘celebration of understanding.’” In the same letter, Milan Rúfus apologizes for the delayed response, quote: “You might consider this letter my four-decade-late answer to your long-ago letter. Then I could not answer even myself; I could only desperately seek an answer, and out of courtesy, the image of the poet did not come out right.”
Milan Rúfus reached readers mainly during the socialist period through his literary work, when many authors and their books were banned. His verses were consolation chiefly for those who found a hidden religious meaning in his work. Karol Nandrásky, on the other hand, throughout his life blamed the church for betraying its message, the good news of the Gospels, and criticized Euro-American culture for the consumerist and militant direction it was taking. Polite letters of thanks, affectionate forms of address, and mutual admiration endured even after the gentle change of 1989, which allowed both authors to write openly and without fear. In his April 1995 letter, Milan Rúfus writes, quote: “The distant, quiet voice addressed me again: The primal form of the poet is the prophet; the subsequent form of the prophet is the poet. Millennia separate them, but the spirit is a son of essence, and time does not mistake it. The prophet had visions in images, and precisely for that reason could not stay outside poetry: metaphor had been his pilgrim’s and punitive staff. And what is poetry without revelation? A widow after the spirit... The study you sent me also convinces me, among other things, of how lawfully kin meet along the invisible pathways of thought.” In his response in January 1998 to Karol Nandrásky’s study Between Dying and Resurrection, Milan Rúfus writes, quote: “I found quite interesting impulses, but I am not sufficiently grounded in the topic to be able to stand at the level you have set.”
The mutual attraction, the shared critical view of the newly emerging democracy, and church life hardened into dogma drew Karol Nandrásky in so much that he wrote an essay at the beginning of 1998 called Milan Rúfus poeta sacer. Fascinated by the poet as a person, he wrote further essays: Rúfus and the World of Tales, If You Are Not Like Children, What I Address, Addressing You. New and new essays on Rúfus kept accumulating on Karol Nandrásky’s computer, and he therefore decided in 2000 to publish a book about Milan Rúfus with the previously mentioned title Milan Rúfus poeta sacer. Note: the original meaning of the Latin word sacer is to be expelled, disowned, cursed. The new meaning of sacer arose in the time when some members of the emerging Christianity in the Roman Empire were persecuted, expelled from society, and killed, and the later generations celebrated them as martyrs and saints. The word sacer has a meaning that is both holy and cursed. Karol Nandrásky informed Milan Rúfus by letter that the essays he had written about him had become a book—a manuscript ready for publication. In Milan Rúfus’s written reply from September 2000, quote: “Dear Professor, dear Karol, your delivery surprised me—I had no inkling that you wanted to publish those individual fragments in book form. I will try to formulate my response, and it will not be easy for me. As I already wrote to you in a letter, in your case this is not literary scholarship. I will elaborate: it is a hybrid between theological disputation and literary analysis. To avoid doing you injustice, I know you do quite a bit of literary text analysis, but you proceed too arbitrarily and force the text to serve your premises. As a professor of theology, you are entitled to do so. What follows from it is unacceptable to me, especially in one point: your attitude to the churches. I will try to explain. It is known to me that from the beginning you belonged to, what shall I call it, a group of church modernists disputing with the methods of church authorities. Yet this is your lifelong parquet. Not mine, and you have pulled me onto that parquet by the hair. But I am not your partisan in this matter. I therefore want to warn you that if the book is published and I receive public questions on this topic from surprised people—and I am likely to receive them—I will distance myself publicly from your stance.”
One month later, in October of that year, Milan Rúfus writes to Karol Nandrásky, quote: “I did not intend to hurt you in any way. My formulations were perhaps clumsy in places because they tried to say too much in the small space of a letter. And they were, in a way, in a hurry.”
Karol Nandrásky published Milan Rúfus poéta sacer in 2002. The book sold out immediately, and in 2004 its second edition also sold out. In March 2002, Milan Rúfus writes to Karol Nandrásky, quote: “...thank you for the surprise you sent. It was perfect. I had no idea what would become of your reflections after the Kaligram episode. I would have had to be someone else not to play the role of a living vain topic, impatient and eager for publicity. I did not know whether you had given up, or continued to struggle... In any case, even a scholar as learned as Šabík has taken off his cap before your broad orientation in the history of culture and from time to time asked me what had become of your manuscript.” In Karol Nandrásky’s response to Milan Rúfus in March 2002, quote: “It is hard for me to write about this / and not because I do not know how to analyze my feelings. / So I use only a metaphorical shortcut. It is something like repairing a cracked, weeping vase. Will it stop? Time will tell. But the time for answering letters is much shorter.” In addition to others, Slavomír Ondrejovič, director of the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, thanked Karol Nandrásky by a letter from December 2002, quote: “Thank you, Professor, for the reading experience. I have copied down some of it, and especially I have ‘experienced’ it. Reading Milan Rúfus and passing him on is not easy for me—indeed, almost daring, one might say. After all, he is a poet, one of the most original, and at the same time, as you have so aptly called him, a poeta sacer.”
Readers mistakenly addressed Milan Rúfus asking him to help them get a copy of the book. Perhaps to ease the tension between the two friends, Milan Rúfus copied a letter he received from one of his readers and sent a copy to Karol Nandrásky. A quote from the reader’s letter: “I read his book (Karol Nandrásky’s) almost in one breath... It amazed me how he can analyze your works and find their true meaning... I do not feel that he took you on as an assistant; rather, he admires you and explains your ideas, which sometimes escaped even me when I was reading them. With this book he paid tribute to your work, even though you are not a devout Christian.” And thus the master asked Karol Nandrásky for several books. From Milan Rúfus’s letter in June 2002, quote: “I would like to thank you for your generous gesture, in which you sent me a plentiful pile of what came forth from your field, and one even drifted beyond the borders. I trust you will also more readily believe my reassurance that there is no reason for a cracked jug. Books have their destinies. Their authors can barely interfere in those destinies.”
And here the friendship of the two literary friends slowly comes to an end. Karol Nandrásky continued his literary work. In 2004 he published Ježišova magna charta, in 2006 Lászlo Remete človek, ktorý prekračoval hranice, and in 2010 Ježiš a súčasnosť. He expressed his dissatisfaction with the Evangelical Church with the gesture of leaving it in 2016. The last letter from the preserved correspondence is the poem “They and You, Lord,” which Milan Rúfus dedicated to Karol Nandrásky, quote:
There lay before me the earth— a widow of spirit. You left them like smoke, like a shy snowflake from the fields, more indifferent to them than those who had been before us, denying You fervently. And today? “Closer to You, God, closer?” What sort of closer, my Lord? To the children of time, You are not worth even denying. You are not their familiar Stranger. Like a mouse with snake-like eyes, fascinated by things, now life is lived. But that You can perhaps be silenced, that is an idea worthy of fools. Be mindful of time, just a little beyond it. A cold, shining vessel so magnificently empty.
“To Karol Nandrásky, as thanks for Magna Charta, Milan Rúfus. 24. 6. 04”
Author: Jaro Zázrivý The quotations by Milan Rúfus are from letter originals he sent to Karol Nandrásky. Karol Nandrásky’s quotation is from a copy of the letter that he himself prepared and attached to the correspondence. Slavomír Ondrejovič’s quotation is from a letter original.