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A Play for the Informed. Rhyming Riddles in National Revival Magazines
Vítová, Andrea
Rhyming riddles and word plays (anagrams, logogriphs, palindromes and charades) in the cultural and social magazines and newspaper supplements of the national revival period represented a genre aimed at passing time. Their encrypted messages pointed to personalities and acts from an environment where a national society was being formed and was accessible mainly to those readers who identified with nationalist circles. A successful solution to a riddle was a key to this certain community.
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The poet’s window into time. Boredom as a suppressed agent of the artistic maturation of Jaroslav Vrchlický
Hrdina, Martin
The work focuses on the circumstances of the time that poet and translator Jaroslav Vrchlický spent in Italy in the summer of 1875. Based on Vrchlický’s journal entries, correspondence and literary works of the time (especially unpublished poems Spleen and Ideal), the author considers the fundamental role of boredom at a time when Vrchlický was coming of age as a person and a creator. He focuses especially on the period during the formulation of the well-known program of the epic, which was the main artistic output of his stay in Italy. With support from Simmel’s interpretation of the work of Arthur Schopenhauer whose pessimistic view of the world Vrchlický rejected, Vrchlický’s epic gesture appears to be a possible method for overcoming melancholy, which he faced as a modern person.
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Středověká epika a problém původnosti v českém literárním dějepisectví v „dlouhém“ 19. století
Turek, Matouš
With special regard to the foregrounding of the issue of cultural transfer, the article traces two axioms of Czech literary historiography in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century – the figure of the Golden Age followed by decline as well as the ideal of originality and authenticity as a fundamental value criterion – and the development in their application onto medieval literature. With reference to synthetical works written by V. V. Haštalský, A. V. Šembera, Karel Tieftrunk and Jaroslav Vlček, the article demonstrates the ways in which the narrative of the decline of Old Czech epic, epitomized in the opposition between the Alexandreis and Tristram a Izalda, was gradually amplified and reaffirmed up until the 1880s, although the evaluation criteria were undergoing a paradigmatic shift. The binary category of originality and authenticity endures but is reinterpreted and recoded so that the opposition indigenous–foreign is superseded by oppositions drawn on the axes original–derivative, created–translated, authorial–anonymous. The syntheses written by Jaroslav Vlček, Arne Novák and Jan Jakubec at the turn of the century, already after the debunking of the allegedly autochthonous Dvůr Králové and Zelená hora manuscripts, present the multilingual nature of literary creativity in the Czech Lands in connection with Old Czech epic in a more positive light, rehabilitating in principle the realization of cultural transfer, although they do still utilize and further broaden the narrative of decline, rooted in the concept of monocultural fundaments of national literatures.
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“To miss out on the Region, the People and Life because of Castles and Ruins…” Tensions between Historicism and Regionalism using Zbudovská Blata as an Example
Hrdina, Martin
The region of Zbudovská Blata including its residents became known throughout Czech society at the beginning of the 20th century mainly thanks to the efforts of writers K. Klostermann and J. Holeček. The purpose of this essay is to recall the key circumstance of the literal presentation of the rural environment, which was a departure from romantic historicism of the 19th century, and to describe the role which the writers above bestowed upon the Blata residents in the context of Czech-speaking society. While Holeček used the Blata surroundings for purposes of a multifaceted polemic with the aristocracy, the conciliatory Klostermann created a timeless symbol from that same environment, thanks to which he secured a permanent place in Czech culture with his novel Mlhy na Blatech (Mist over Blata).
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he Appropriation of Folk rhetoric and the Genre of the (Folk) Fairytale of the 19th century
Šidák, Pavel
The essay describes the appropriation of the folk fairytale in Czech artistic literature. The related phenomena and problems are also discussed. In the first half of the 19th century, when the fairytale was appropriated as a genre, this was mainly about finding a functional spot for the fairytale and its genre form. In the second half of the century, it was about the term “modus”, which the fairytale used to influence so-called high literature and its narrative strategy.
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The City Dweller´s Distrust of Folk. The Narrative Figure
Jedličková, Alice
This paper focuses on a strategy used to represent rural people, or “simple folk,” in narratives whose goal is to motivate readers to reassess their own attitudes towards the folk. The authorial intent of such works draws from the idea that traditional values are not appreciated and therefore must be discovered and protected (e.g., language, the past, the rural folk). Urban dwellers’ prejudiced perception of the countryside represented in such narratives can be simply formulated through contrasting images: for example, the progress, education, and conveniences offered by the city versus the backwardness, ignorance, and poverty of the countryside. This strategy is based on the distrustful or dismissive views of city people towards the folk as implicitly voiced by the narrator or by a specific character in the narrative. In contrast, we also find rather explicit counterarguments against these views in the speech of the narrator or in the speech, actions, and behaviors of the characters. In rural-themed prose from the 1850s through the 1870s, the subject matter of this study, this constellation of ideas and opposing ideas is regularly reflected in both the story and the narrative discourse and forms a stable narrative device, which substantially contributes to forming the narrative point-of-view and its effectiveness in persuading readers. In some works, this narrative device permeates the entire text and affects its genre - in Božena Němcová’s short story “Poor Folk” the “slice of life” genre intertwines with the genre of argument: every situation presented is in some regards an argument against the previously established idea that “city people distrust the folk.”
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