Kukucín, Martin

(pseudonym of Matej Bencúr). Born May 17, 1860, in Jasenová, Slovakia; died May 25, 1928, in Lipik, Croatia. Slovak writer. Came from a peasant family. He was a village schoolteacher. In 1894 he began to work as a physician in Dalmatia. From 1908 to 1922 he lived in South America.

Kukučín’s short stories, drawn from the life of the Slovak village, and his novel The House on the Slope (1903–04) laid the foundation of critical realism in Slovak prose. He was the author of the five-volume epic chronicle Mother Is Calling (1926–27), about the hard life of Slavic émigrés in South America, as well as the historical novels Lukáš Blahosej Krasoň and Bohumil Valizlost’Zábor (both published posthumously in 1929). Kukučin translated the works of N. V. Gogol into Slovak.