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Josef Kajetán Tyl’s Nocturnal Strolls. The Urban Periphery in the 1830s in the genre of scene from life
Piorecká, Kateřina
Around the mid-1830s, the genre from life, subsequently renamed to sketch, found its way into the Czech literary context. In terms of content, the genre’s focus was notably on the subject of urban life and its social aspects. The everyday reality of a big city and its geographical as well as social periphery had been previously viewed, from the aesthetic perspective of Czech society of the time, as a schockingly inappropriate theme. J. K. Tyl’s unfinished series of sketches, Z nočních potůlek po městách prazských (Nocturnal Strolls through Prague’s Quarters“), marked the first times Czech readers were confronted with the world of prostitutes, alcoholics and gamblers. In the mid-1830s, it represented, alongside Mácha’s Marinka, a unique attempt at introducing into Czech literature a previously tabooized theme, together with a new style of writing which could be defined as protorealistic.
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