“Suddenly, guys, we all were going! There was great arms equipping in Nová Baňa and everyone, even the fifteen-year-old Mišo Kováč-Adamov, hurried over the mountains to the military barracks in Nová Baňa, where weapons were being distributed. ‘You are not eighteen years old yet!’ ‘I will be soon!’ ‘And have you ever been shooting?’ ‘Yes, I have!’ Of course, I used to shoot at the woodsman´s from an air gun… ‘You´re lying you were shooting, you´re lying you are eighteen already, go home!’ So this kind of experience I have as well.” This is the kind of experience I had too.
“Suddenly (my grandfather) heard someone speaking American. He could speak American – English. And he asked that (teacher): ‘Who is the man you are guiding?’ ‘An airman fell over to us.’ ‘Do you speak English?’ ‘No, I hardly speak some German.’ And he began to speak English with him. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Well, they are going there, couldn´t you help him?’ He swore: ‘Son of a bitch! Miško, tell them at home where I am!’ He jumped over the fence, even being an old man already – sixty-year-old. – To me he seemed to be very old back then, and he didn´t come home for weeks. He helped to escort that pilot…”
“I listened to all of his vulgarisms, witnessed his failures to make decisions – he decided this way, and in a little while, he would change his mind. I even said to the minister: ‘He’s an idiot!’ At first the minister defended him, since he still belonged to the VPN back then. But when the VPN dissolution happened, he said: ‘You were right, Mišo!’ Thus I said to my wife: ‘I´m going home, I don´t want to be here anymore, it´s heading to catastrophe. I´m not going to work together with that fool.’ And Eňa (wife) told me: ‘Mišo, don´t do it. They will say you are incompetent! Is that what you want to happen at the end of your life?’”
“When Masaryk came to Topoľčianky, he used to regularly ride a horse in the countryside. Once he met Libor Borkovič: ‘Libor, what are you doing here?’ He said: ‘I live here.’ And so he would regularly visit our family, he would take me on a horseback rides, he gave a job to my mom; I often used to come to Topoľčianky. There is even a picture showing Thomas G. Masaryk, Karel Čapek and little Miško in discussion.”
The greatest human culture is the culture of banding together. And that is democracy
Administrator MS in 1993
photo: Slovenská národná knižnica, Literárny archív.
photo: Slovenská národná knižnica, Literárny archív.
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Mišo Kováč-Adamov, real name Michal Kováč, cultural and literary historian, theatrologist and playwright, was born on May 24, 1930 in Zlaté Moravce. Between 1946 - 1951 he attended the grammar school in Zlaté Moravce. From 1951 - 1956 he studied Slovak language and literature, and in 1961 - 1962 also librarianship at the Faculty of Arts of the Comenius University in Bratislava. In 1969 - 1970 he studied museology at the Faculty of Arts of JE Purkyně University in Brno. During the period from 1956 - 1990, he worked in Matica slovenská in Martin, initially as a worker of the Bibliographic Department, and then later (1966 - 1971) as the Director of the Memorial of Slovak Literature. From 1971 - 1990, he worked at the Department of Literary Museum. Between the years 1961 - 1963, as a Secretary of the Preparatory Committee, he took part in the centenary celebrations of Matica slovenská. At the same time, from 1971 - 1999 he lectured on literary museology at the university in Brno. After the Velvet Revolution, during the time between 1990 - 1992, he served as Deputy Minister of Culture of the Slovak Republic in Bratislava. Afterwards from 1993 - 1994 he worked in Martin as an administrator of Matica slovenská, and since 1993 he lectured also on cultural history and Slavonic at the Theological Institute in Badín. He was retired from 1995, lived and worked in Martin. On May 21, 2023, Michal Kováč-Adamov died.
