The study of literature - whether of a scientific, critical or aesthetically enjoyable nature - presumes the comparison of a particular literary work with another contrasting one. Fre-quently the comparison starts with the theme: How is a certain situation, a certain action, represented and depicted in one work compared with another? The creativity, the literary potency of an author can be measured, when one work is contrasted side by side with an-other one of the same thematic basis. Of course, this is not the only approach to a literary evaluation but nevertheless a very important one. It becomes even more important if we expand the question of a literary evaluation to a comparison in its narrow sense and to a culturally scientific point of view. All in all, if we consider literature as a discovery of past religious, collectively conforming and typical or even only psychologically remarkable ideas, we want to know whether that which we are reading represents something truly unique or only a specific expansion of widely disseminated ideas. In one word, one would like to know thematic parallels.

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