Manitou's Gift

Viera Bombová (1932-2005) was a master of the dreamlike Slovak book illustrations of the 60s and 70s. Of this poetic surrealism assimilating many elements of archaic and folk art, a main source was Vincent Hložník who in the 1950s educated at the Bratislava art school a great generation of young illustrators – we will also publish from their graphics. This trend certainly appeared at that time also in the Slovak art life, at exhibitions and galleries, in albums and on the walls of the homes of intellectuals, but we know little about it. What reached out to us were mostly the book illustrations, thanks to the publishing industry of the period which supported ex officio the mutual translation of the products of the brotherly Socialist countries.


Bombová’s most richly illustrated work is the collection of Slovak folk tales Janko Gondášik (Swine herdsman Janko) compiled at the turn of the century by Samo Czambel, whose pictures – we will also publish them soon – often remind you of the paintings of Lajos Vajda or Endre Bálint working at the same time on the other, Hungarian side of the Danube. The elements of Slovak folk art appear naturally on these images, and later, curiously, they mix just as naturally in the American Native or Pacific motifs in the folk tale books of the respective people.

Manitou ajándéka. Indián mesék (Manitou’s Gift. Native American folk tales),
Bratislava-Budapest, 1968

Joseph Bruchac: Ellis Island Beyond the red bricks of Ellis Island where the two Slovak children who became my grandparents waited the long days of quarantine, after leaving the sickness, the old Empires of Europe, a Circle Line ship slips easily on its way to the island of the tall woman, green as dreams of forests and meadows waiting for those who’d worked a thousand years yet never owned their own

Like millions of others, I too come to this island, nine decades the answerer of dreams Yet only one part of my blood loves that memory. Another voice speaks of native lands within this nation. Lands invaded when the earth became owned. Lands of those who followed the changing Moon, knowledge of seasons in their veins.

(The Remembered Land. An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1993)