Святые Кирилл и Мефодий в творчестве словацкого поэта Яна Голлого (1785 1849) [Svjatye Kirill i Mefodij v tvorcestve slovackogo poėta Jana Gollogo (1785-1849)]

The purpose of this article is to examine the sources used by the slovak poet, Catholic priest and patriot J n Hollý for the composition of his poems in hexameters Svatopluk (1833) and Cyrillo-Metodiada (1835) and the Biography (in prose) of the two holy brothers. In addition, the article intends to highlight how he combined in the poems the data taken from historical sources known at the time, mainly in Latin, with elements of fantasy necessary for poetic creation. Regarding the Biography, the version of the entire Cyrillo- Methodian proposed by Holly story will be analyzed by comparing it with the works of Dobrovský, especially Kirill und Method, der Slaven Apostles (Prague, 1823) and M hrische Legende von Cyrill und Method (Prague, 1826) that Holly himself says to have had access to, to evaluate the contribution of the Slovak poet to historiography not only on the holy brothers, but also on the early stages of the Slavic writing culture. Analyzingthe literary works, we can conclude that sources were used in different ways in the three works: for Svatopluk he reworked the historical events reported in the Frankish Annals of 870-871, giving the controversial protagonist Svatopluk a more "heroic" character; he then used his imagination to create the other Slovak heroic character, Slavomir, and resorted to contemporary Slavic mythology studies, to give a name to the pagan gods who intervene in human affairs (on the model of the ancient epic) and opposed them to St. Cyril. For Cirillo-Metodiada, whose events end in Rome shortly before the death of Cyril, Holly had to exploit as much as possible every single detail, but this could not be enough for a poem in 6 songs of over 2.600 lines: the events reported by the sources were too few and unsuitable to be developed on a narrative level, so Holly was forced to develop legendary motifs as well. There are several historical errors in the poem, corrected in the Biography.The numerous events that occurred to Methodius as archbishop, which Holly manages to reconstruct quite well in the Biography (except for imprisonment) since he had access to the papal letters and various other documents, couldn’t be used in his poem because they did not fall within the part of the story that he wanted to deal with. Unlike the two poetic works, in which the Cyrillo-Methodian data are used for artistic creation, the Biography can be defined as a serious reconstruction of the history of the "Apostles of the Slavs", based certainly on the works of Dobrovsky, which Holly studied thoroughly, but to which he added his own considerations drawn from his in-depth knowledge of direct sourcesand from the works of Slovak historians of the late 18th century (Papanek, Sklenar). The Biography is an interesting contribution to Cyrillo-Methodian historiography, in the period between Dobrovsky’s works (1823-1826) and A.V. Gorsky's study of 1843