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„How Nice It Was in the Sitting Room When It Had Grown Dark!“ The Black Hour and Reflection on it in 19th-Centrury Czech Literature
Piorecká, Kateřina
In the 19th century the term “the black hour” meant the break in work at sunset, before it was worth lighting the lamps. Figuratively it became the general term for the period of dusk and after nightfall, when people used to sit together and talk. This phenomenon was originally connected with winter seasonal work, in particular flas-spinning session. The lighting conditions allowed oral traditions to survive, which in the course of the 19th century came to interest students of folklore and ethnographers. However, the process of industrialisation not only put an end to the tradition of people sitting together and talking while spinning or plucking feathers, but also severed cyclical time and placed the emphasis on the linearity of everything that happened. As part of the progressive transformation of traditional structures in civil society the process of literalisation needs to be observed as well. Czech writers imprinted oral forms such as legends, fairy-tales, or humorous stories into prestigious literary genres such as ballads, idylls, or short stories whit a moral. Taking the example of Božena Němcová’s shor proses and her novel Babička (Grandmother), the article shows that as a writer she tried to raise texts that had been passed down orally into the literary canon by the use of prestigious genres.
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Letters of Božena Němcová´s Family
Kokešová, Helena
The author concentrated on letters among J. Němec and the children Karel, Jaroslav and Dora and on letters among the brothers and sisters themselves that still remained unnoticed and hidden. The letters contain valuable information not only about their personal life but also about their everyday life, about the cultural and political development of the Czech society during the second half of the 19th century. They have also other dimension given by the fact that J. Němec worked in Russia. It is possible to find interesting facts in his letters that broaden our knowledge about the history of travelling, about the way of life of Russian and Tartar people, about the life of Czechs in Russia and the information about the history of medicine. Because both sons were distinguished pomologists, information about the development of this field is noticed, too. The family letters contain also the important information about so called B. Němcová's second life.
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