In 1783 a parish priest in Upper Hungary published a novel in Slovak at his own expense — the first Slovak novel, and the first novel in a minor language anywhere in the Habsburg monarchy. In Central Europe only German and Polish had produced novels by then. Dobrota Pucherová’s essay for the Public Domain Review tells the story of Jozef Ignác Bajza’s René, or: A Young Man’s Adventures and Experiences, a book that was half-printed, confiscated by the Church, destroyed by fire, and finally translated into English for the first time in 2025.

Bajza (ca. 1754–1836) was a yeoman’s son, a Reformed Catholic, a Josephinian, and by his own account the “awakener” of the Slovaks. Eighteenth-century Hungary was a feudal kingdom with essentially no bourgeoisie, where Latin and German ran the state and literacy was an aristocratic and clerical privilege. Bajza — fluent in German, Hungarian, Latin, Czech, and probably French — chose to write in Slovak anyway, to argue that the Slovaks deserved to be a modern European nation with a history, a language, and books of their own.

The novel itself:

  • A young Venetian, René (“the reborn”), travels with his companion Van Stiphout to choose a calling and polish his mind
  • Book I takes them among the “backward heathens” of Lebanon and Egypt — harem rescues, shipwreck, captivity, escape from forced conversion, and Herodotean lectures on crocodiles, medicine, and Islam
  • Book II brings them to Northern Italy, Austria, and Upper Hungary, where they catalogue serfdom, usury, illiteracy, superstition, quack doctors, the exploitation of peasants by landed gentry, and the corruption of monasteries
  • The genre is a hybrid: bildungsroman, philosophical novel, romance, adventure story, travelogue, history, and orientalist fantasy in one — a whole national literature’s worth of functions packed into a single book

The Eastern setting is the familiar Enlightenment device, borrowed from Voltaire’s Zadig and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters: describing Islam lets Bajza describe home. Writing of Muslims’ belief in fake miracles, he adds that “our land has examples of its own, quite similar gullibility.” Egypt’s supposed “innate stupidity” — no opera houses, no theatres — is a coded verdict on Slovakia. Most pointed is his treatment of Slovak self-colonization: the travellers watch a man beat another who offers no resistance, and only slowly realise the aggressor is pretending to be Hungarian — Hungarian whiskers, a hotchpotch of languages — because Hungarianness reads as class.

Bajza was no radical. He thought the French Enlightenment threatened faith and social order, looked to Joseph II for reform rather than revolution, and spent his life fighting provincial censors instead of sovereigns. He called clerical celibacy a “state against nature” and hoped it would be abolished; he financed his publications from parish lands, ran his farm as a model of improvement, and was known for getting into arguments and fistfights with landowners and their magistrates. He also helped his parishioners write a letter of complaint against their landlord, Baron Imrich Perényi, on the grounds that defending them from injustice was a pastoral obligation.

The censorship story is the sharpest part of the essay:

  • His first book, 300 Horatian epigrams, was blocked by the local censor as “shocking and pernicious . . . ambiguous, obscene, offensive to pious ears, sly, possibly heretical”
  • He took Book I straight past the Slovak censor to the imperial bureau in Vienna, got his stamp, and had it printed by a German printer in Bratislava
  • Vienna found the novel quaint and outdated — it never mocks the pope or the sovereign, adores Joseph II, and so was harmless where Candide was banned in Austria until 1798
  • In 1785 the central bureau endorsed Book II, but Vicar-General Nagy interrupted the printing, confiscated the copies, and a consistorial assembly ruled the novel “in many places offensive” and unfit to see daylight
  • Book II was never fully printed; the manuscript burned in the fire that took Bajza’s library. Eighteen chapters survive

In the absence of a standard Slovak, Bajza invented his own idiolect and proposed it as a codification — a version his successors rejected as too indebted to Latin syntax and Czech vocabulary. Anton Bernolák published his Grammatica Slavica seven years later.

The afterlife is a lesson in how canons get made. Bajza’s Romantic and Realist successors acknowledged him as a pioneer and ignored the novel; it stayed obscure until 1948, the year of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, when it turned out to be ideologically ideal — a single text that could be read as a critique of feudalism, capitalism, and the Catholic Church at once. In 1980 the comic duo Milan Lasica and Július Satinský staged Our Friend René, in which René is mummified in Egypt and only his brain survives, carried home in spirits as “evidence of his revolutionary ideas.” The play was banned before opening night and had to wait for the regime to fall; it was revived to acclaim in Bratislava in 2024.

Pucherová’s larger point is historiographic. René appeared in a country without a bourgeoisie, without a reading public, and almost without books — which complicates the standard account of the novel as the genre of capitalism, the middle class, and the public sphere. The rise of the novel in Europe was contingent and discontinuous, and much stranger than the Anglocentric version allows.

The English translation by David Short (edited by Pucherová and Erika Brtáňová, Liverpool University Press, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2025) is the first into any other language.