Abstract
From the amount of works with the milieu of inter-war Zakarpattia, two authors differ - the ruralist Josef Knap with his novel Puszta (1937) and the socialist realist Oskar Mališ and his novel Lidé na Alföldu (1948). The people in their focus are not Rusyns from the Carpathian mountains, but Hungarians, the autochton population from the lowlands of the Tisza river.
It is possible to read Knap's Puszta in its "cross-composition" as a relationship of vertical and horizontal features founded in allusions to the Script reaching the very moral of the story. Knap describes by stories of Czech colonists of Hungarian puszta a metaphysical necessity to abandon any imported verticality (church and faith, elders and children, tradition and imported potentiality, civilization) and to sacrifice it even literally (the only sacret place of the colonists is a graveyard) to the chthonic element to make possible any subsequent creation and building.
The image of HUngarians is positive par excellence and they are conditio sine qua non of a sporadic prosperity of the Czechs. The fate of the most of the colonists is tragic.
Puszta was probably influenced by the narrative of the Nordic impressionism with a landscape as the main character and narrator and with the democratic distribution and depiction of the characters and their roles. While Knap's Puszta might be compared to anti-colonialist and mythical texts of e.g.
Joseph Conrad, the other Czech novel by Oskar Mališ is a mere paraphrase of the Soviet branch of the socialistic realism and could be compared with works written by such authors like El'mar Grin, Tikhon Semushkin and hundreds of others, whose texts have not only described colonialism, but have been its tool. Knap's Puszta and Mališ's Lidé na Alföldu describe the same Czech historical phenomenon.
HOwever, they extremely differ in particular motives, the way of narration and its interpretation.