Two hundred years ago, in 1787, Anton Bernolák, philologist of the Slovak Enlightenment, published his Dissertatio Philologico-Critica, a constitutent part of which was the codification of the first literary norm of the Slovak language. But three years earlier than this, the first Slovak novel, René mládenca príhody a skúsenosti (The adventures and experiences of young René), whose author was the Enlightenment priest Jozef Ignác Bajza, had been published. The fact that in his conception of the literary language Bajza was in controversy with his fellow Roman Catholic cleric Bernolák is not important, nor is it important that the dream of a literary language for the Slovaks was not fulfilled until the middle of the next century; that 1840s language was codified on the basis of a different dialect from that chosen by Bernolák. One cannot, however, ignore the fact that at the time when the Slovak men of the Enlightenment were endeavouring to establish the basic tool of literary production, a literary language, Fielding, Richardson and Smollett — to mention only the British Isles — were writing their best novels. In the beginnings of modern Slovak fiction, that is in Bajza's picaresque novel, we find a constant tension between the narrator's conviviality as a writer of traveller's tales and a philosophical, reflective approach which reveals the sensibility and morals of the times. This foreshadows an inner tension which has not disappeared from Slovak fiction even two hundred years later: narration and analysis meet as two inseparable sisters, but also as angry brothers.