On the Aspects of the Poetics of a Key Text of the 1960s – Šialený mesiac by J. Ondruš

The subject of the paper is Šialený mesiac /The Mad Moon/ by J. Ondruš as a key poetic text of Slovak lyric written in the 1960s – placing the accent on the aspects of his poetics and the ways of identifying them. The paper evolves in several steps. 1. It takes notice of the updates of surreal inspirations namely in the 1960s. 2. It confronts the versions of the poem published in a magazine and in his book debut, it takes notice of certain corrections of excentricity of the subject-character. 3. It presents an attempt at mythological and philosophical, and intertextual placing of the lunar and lunatic motifs with regard to The Mad Moon. 4. It shows (in reference to P. Ricoeur) the progression of „stain“, „mistake“ and „guilt“ as the indices of fatal human deficitness. 5. The actual critical reading of the poem follows the oscillation between the factual physical everyday dimension of the course of events, and the emphatic, „lunatically“ excessive one,: the „mad moon“ as a cipher of human and poetic existence, as a cipher of poetry itself, its magic power and deficitness