CZECH LITERATURE

the body of writing in the Czech language. Before 1918 there was no independent nation of Czechoslovakia, and Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech-speaking regions that now constitute the Czech Republic, were for a long time provinces of the Habsburg Holy Roman and Austrian empires. Because of this, the evolution of the Czechs' literary language became historically linked to their efforts to maintain their ethnic identity. The earliest origins of literature in Czech are connected with Old Church Slavonic, which was devised by Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century to counter Frankish (German) influence. Latin was established as the liturgical language of the Bohemian state in 1097, however, and its script was adopted for what would become the Czech language. The earliest preserved texts in the Czech language, mainly hymns, were written in the late 13th century at the courts of the Premyslid kings of Bohemia. The 14th century brought a continuous stream of Czech literary works, mostly consisting of biographies of saints (hagiography), legends, epics and chronicles, and adaptations of chivalrous romances, all in verse. The earliest secular work in the language was the epic Alexandreis, a life of Alexander the Great based on a Latin poem by the French writer Gautier de Chtillon. From about 1350, prose genres began to be cultivated, initially descriptions of the lives of saints and chronicles and then versions of popular medieval tales. From the last part of the century dated a group of verse satires and didactic poems as well as the political allegory Nov rada (The New Council), written by Smil Flaka to defend the rights of the Bohemian nobility against the crown. Religious reforms begun by Jan Hus in the early 15th century set in motion the Hussite movement, which for two centuries pitted Czech reformers or Protestants against the Roman Catholic rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. The religious controversies and civil strife of this period fostered the use of Czech writing for practical and polemical purposes. Hus himself composed strong sermons in Czech and wrote a treatise reforming Czech orthography under the title De orthographia Bohemica. Petr Chelcick, one of his successors, wrote treatises containing radical social ideas from which sprang the Unitas Fratrum, or Bohemian Brethren, a sect and prototype of the Moravian church that became an important source of Czech literature for the next two centuries. Czech literature in the 16th century was predominantly didactic and scholarly, reflecting the humanism of the European Renaissance. The Moravian bishop Jan Blahoslav completed an early translation of the New Testament, and the lexicographer Daniel Adam z Veleslavna further enriched the vocabulary of humanist Czech, but the most significant landmark of the period was the Unitas Fratrum scholars' translation of the Bible into Czech, known as the Kralice Bible (157993). The language of this version became the model for classical Czech. The Austrian Habsburgs defeated the Protestants of Bohemia in 1620, after which Protestantism was eradicated and Bohemia was brought under direct rule within the Austrian Habsburg domain. The (largely Protestant) Bohemian nobility was crushed and replaced by newcomers with little knowledge of Czech. Under the Habsburgs, the literary traditions of the past two centuries were proscribed, and it was only among political exiles that Czech literature survived at all. Among these exiles Jan mos Komensk (John Amos Comenius) was preeminent. His Latin works on education and theological problems and his works in Czech revealed him as a writer and thinker of European stature. His Labyrint sveta a rj srdce (1631; Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart) stands as one of Czech literature's great achievements in prose. By the 18th century, however, Czech had practically ceased to be used for higher literary purposes. The historicism and antiquarianism of the late 18th century led many Czech scholars to investigate their country's earlier literature and history. Moreover, Bohemian patriotism revived in reaction against the centralizing tendencies of the Habsburg government under the empress Maria Theresa. These two phenomena combined with currents of the Romantic movement to inaugurate a Czech national literary revival in the first half of the 19th century. At the same time, social and economic developments were helping create a new middle-class audience for Czech literature. Czech Romanticism drew impetus from the efforts of both scholars and literary artists. The scholar Josef Dobrovsk studied and codified a revived Czech literary language. Josef Jungmann set out to extend and modernize the Czech vocabulary through his translations (including John Milton's Paradise Lost, 1811) and his monumental Czech-German dictionary (183539). The revival was also furthered by the Moravian historian Frantiek Palack and the Slovak archaeologist Pavel Josef afark. The Slovak Jan Kollr, who wrote in Czech, produced the first significant work in the revived language with his allegorical sonnet cycle Slvy dcera (The Daughter of Slava). Interest in early Czech literature was further stimulated by several brilliant hoax manuscripts, purported to be from the early Middle Ages but actually written by Vclav Hanka, which have held their own as examples of Romantic poetry. The greatest poet of Czech Romanticism, and perhaps of all Czech poets, was Karel Hynek Mcha. His lyrics, prose fragments, and a lyrical epic, Mj (1836; May), showed the influence of Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and the Polish Romantics but transcended these influences by its intensity of poetic vision and perfection of language. In the 1840s there was a reaction against the Romantic vision. The political journalist Karel Havlcek-Borovsk and the novelist Bozena Nemcov were both concerned with practical issues and did much to emancipate Czech prose from the older classical manner, bringing it nearer to everyday speech. Nemcov became best known for Babicka (The Grandmother), an idealized portrayal of country life in sketches whose precise, realistic descriptions and firmly individual language were new in Czech prose. The Mj group, named in honour of Mcha's great lyrical epic, was a school of writers in the second half of the 19th century who sought to create a Czech literature imbued with their own liberal and pragmatic nationalist aims. Prominent in their ranks was the poet and short-story writer Jan Neruda, known for his sardonic sketches in Povdky malostransk (1878; Tales of the Little Quarter). Other notable figures of the Mj group were the novelist Karolina Svetl and the poet Vitezslav Hlek. By the 1870s Czech literature had fully established itself in poetry and the novel but not yet in the drama. Literary life crystallized around two groups associated with the periodicals Lumir and Ruch (Stir). The former stressed the need to Europeanize Czech literature, while the latter looked to the strength of native traditions and themes. The leading representative of the cosmopolitan tendency was Jaroslav Vrchlick (pseudonym of Emil Frda), who was probably the most prolific of all Czech writers. His lyrics show an amazing mastery of language, while a vast cycle of historical epics probably contain his best work. But perhaps his greatest influence was exercised by his many translations of major European writers. Cosmopolitanism also found expression in Julius Zeyer's novels and short stories. The principal figure in the nativist trend was Svatopluk Cech, who composed historical epics, idyllic pictures of Czech country life, and prose satires aimed at the philistinism of the Czech middle classes. The Czech novel of the late 19th century exhibited a trend toward realistic description in the works of the historical novelists Alois Jirsek and Zikmund Winter. Both men presented romanticized versions of Czech history, but their historical details were based on scholarly research. Jirsek's novels presented an entire history of the Czechs up to his own time, concentrating in particular on the Hussite period and the national revival of 1780 onward. In the last decade of the century new trends in poetry began to appear in the works of Otakar Brezina (pseudonym of Vclav Jebav) and Petr Bezruc (pseudonym of Vladimir Vasek). Brezina expressed a personal religion in a language of great subtlety and originality, and his metrical structures (including free rhythms) had great influence on later poets. Bezruc was a regional poet, obsessed by the national and social oppression of the Czechs of German-ruled Silesia. With the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state in 1918, Czech literature flourished. Czech drama came into its own in the idealistic and satirical plays of Karel Capek and Frantiek Langer. Capek's best plays exposed the problems of a centralized, mechanized society of the 20th century: R.U.R. (1920), which introduced the word robot into English, and Ze zivota hmyzu (1921; The Insect Play). Narrative prose reached a new peak with such writers as Capek, Jaroslav Haek, and Vladislav Voncura. Shortly after World War I ended Haek began his sequence of novels called Osudy dobrho vojka Svejka za svetov vlky (192123; The Good Soldier Schweik). These works set in the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire remain widely read to the present day. Capek's fiction included Wellsian fantasies, subtle psychological studies, and short stories. In the period between 1918 and 1945, the lyric poetry of Josef Hora, Frantiek Halas, Vtezslav Nezval, and Jaroslav Seifert exhibited great vitality and variety, with work of the highest quality being produced. After World War II, however, the newly established communist regime suppressed free literary activity and permitted only works conforming to the drab and restrictive tenets of Socialist Realism. Czech writing consequently underwent a marked decline. When strict political controls were relaxed in the early 1960s, the novels of Josef kvoreck and Milan Kundera, the short stories of Bohumil Hrabal and Arnot Lustig, the poetry of Miroslav Holub, and the plays of Vclav Havel began attracting international attention. In the wake of the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, many of these writers were suppressed in Czechoslovakia, though their reputations continued to grow abroad. Of the writers who emigrated to the Western nations, Kundera and kvoreck soon attained prominence in their adopted countries. During that same period, belated interest was shown abroad in the achievements of Czech lyric poetry in the interwar period, and Seifert, its chief surviving representative, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. After the democratic revolution of 1989, freer literature flourished, and the playwright Vclav Havel, who had been a dissident, became president of Czechoslovakia and, later, of the Czech Republic.