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Wandering off after Libuše, or the Identities of Josef Jiří Kolár
Futtera, Ladislav
This study analyses three works by the writer and playwright Josef Jiři Kolar: the German-language short story Libussa am Missisippi (Libuše in Mississippi, 1842), its Czech version Libuše v Americe (Libuše in America, 1854) and the drama Věštba Libušina (Libuše’s Prophecy, 1868). These are used as an example to demonstrate Kolar’s artistic development and changes in the identity of a writer working in the Czech lands around the mid-19th century. During the period under review, Kolar, who in 1842 had been an actor in German and Czech ensembles at the Estates Theatre, publishing in both languages, came to be an acclaimed Czech-language playwright. This career is faithfully reflected in these three texts. In the case of Libuše in Mississippi, this is an original attempt to critically come to terms from the position of the Young Bohemia (Junges Bohmen) artistic group with the heritage of romantic poetics, romantic stereotypes about the Czech lands and ultimately with the romantic nationalism of the Czech national movement. Although Kolar made a number of alterations when rendering the novel into Czech, his text was not compatible with the mythological-historical reading of the Libuše legend, dominant in Czech-language culture. It was not until Libuše’s Prophecy, staged to mark the laying of the foundation stones for the National Theatre, that he did conform. Kolar negated both of his previous Libuše texts with her message, which appealed to the historicism that pervaded Czech society. However, this negation also meant a definitive artistic identification with the Czech national programme and the acceptance of a Czech national identity. With regard to his creative trajectory, Kolar may thus be perceived as a typical representative of the generation of artists who began their career in the early 1840s, critically addressing Romanticism and Romantic nationalism, but after the 1848 revolution its members integrated, both on the Czech and the German side, into the nationalized bourgeois society of the Czech lands.
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