6 ARTICLES Myth, Motif, and Motivation: Pavol Dobšinský’s Theory and Practice of the Wondertale

Pavol Dobšinský was a Štúrovec, a member of that first generation of Slovak literary figures who gave direction to the nascent Slovak literary movement following Ľudovít Štúr’s decisive break from Czech literary language in 1846. Like many others, he was a Lutheran minister, trained in one of the Lutheran secondary schools. His studies began at the lyceum in Levoča in 1840 at age twelve, just three years before its ranks were swelled by students from the lyceum in Bratislava that had been closed by a Hungarian church commission. The reasons for closure were the suspicious activities going on there, including the students ’ active collecting of prose folklore and Štúr’s lectures on folk poetry and prose. Dobšinský soon became one of the most active student collectors of folktales. In 1858, along with Augustín Horislav Škultéty, he began publishing the second collection of Slovak folktales, Slovenské povesti (Slovak tales).(1) That same year he went to Banská Štiavnica to become professor at the Lutheran lyceum and editor of the literary magazine Sokol (Falcon). The folktales came out serially in small volumes until the sixth and last in 1861 when Dobšinský took a pastoral position in Drienčany and could no longer communicate with his publisher. In the late 1860s Dobšinský led the Matica Slovenská cultural organization’s collecting efforts that led to the publication in 1871 and 1874 of two volumes of a collection of Slovak national songs, tales, proverbs and sayings, riddles, games, customs and beliefs, with contributions from Dobšinský in every category. In 1880 he published his own volume, a description of fol