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The article assesses the reception of the life and work of Amália Sirotková (1813 - 1892), the first known Slovak woman collector of fairy tales whose collection of tales has been preserved in manuscript form. The paper points to significant discrepancies between information on A. Sirotková and her tales published in literature and facts based on available source materials. The author rigorously analyses the conclusions of researchers who wrote about A. Sirotková (Bohumil Haluzický, 1952; Karel Horálek, 1989), information included in Ľudovít V. Rizner's Bibliografia slovenského písomníctva ([Bibliography of Slovak literature], 1933), and the biographical entry on A. Sirotková in Slovenský biografický slovník ([Slovak biographical dictionary], 1993). The article revises the facts provided in these references in the context of the research of fairy tales in the 19th century. The aim of the article is to accentuate the necessity to work with primary sources which help avoid drawing conclusions based on nonfactual links. Such imprecisions occur especially when it comes to marginally known personalities with very few references in literature and result in a distorted literary-historical portrait which does not correspond to the facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, I investigate the use of folktales in the historical legitimization of a particular type of socio-political transformation: Yugoslav self-governing socialism. In this respect I address a less researched and complex topic, while the Yugoslav ideology of self-governance, compared to other 20th century political ideologies, was based on discontinuity - a break with tradition and the past. In order to sharpen the specific function of the narrative tradition in Yugoslav socialism and on the basis of the sociological theory of fairy tales and Walter Benjamin's insights into the role of the narrative tradition, which he reflected on as a transhistorical medium for the transmission of collective experiences - I have devised a research approach that differentiates the epistemic and ideological function of fairy tales. I test this approach via the example of the appropriation of folktales in the Third Reich and Soviet communist regime, and then turn to an analysis of these mechanisms in the context of Yugoslav self-government. On the basis of various theories and understanding of Yugoslav selfgovernance (E. Kardelj, J. Županov, P. Matvejević, D. Suvin, B. Jakovljević etc.), I put forward that the tradition in the latter was expressed in the prism of an alienation effects. I illustrate this with an extensive comparative and transhistorical analysis of the fairy-tale motif of The Gigantic Turnip, especially its unusual Slovenian version which can be perceived as a critical commentary of the socialist motto "together we are stronger". In the conclusion, I reflect upon the theoretical consequences of the Yugoslav self-governing project from the point of view of the theory of societal transformation, and connect this topic to the dilemmas concerning contemporary risks such as the climate crisis, which have no historical equi valent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]