A study devoted to the image of Slovakia in the Czech poetry of 1860-1939, ie poetic stereotypes, which were formed even before the creation of a common Czech-Slovak state in 1918. Slovakia was then perceived in a romantic spirit as a beautiful land with virgin nature and people not affected by the corruption of civilization. The aspirations of the Slovaks to language and national self-determination were negatively assessed – not considering the historical, ethnic and political aspects, Slovakia became a natural part of the Czech national project. The reference of Czechs to Slovaks with a sense of superiority, their attitude of “elder brother” can be defined, somewhat hyperbolically, as a colonial one.
PL
Studium poświęcone jest obrazowi Słowacji w czeskiej poezji lat 1860-1939, tj. stereotypom poetyckim, które ukształtowały się jeszcze przed powstaniem w 1918 roku wspólnego państwa czesko-słowackiego. Słowacja odbierana była wtedy w duchu romantycznym jako piękna kraina z dziewiczą przyrodą i ludem niedotkniętym zepsuciem cywilizacyjnym. Negatywnie oceniano dążenie Słowaków do językowego i narodowego samostanowienia – nie uwzględniając aspektu historycznego, etnicznego i politycznego, mniemano, iż Słowacja stanowi naturalną część czeskiego projektu narodowego. Odnoszenie się Czechów do Słowaków z poczuciem wyższości, ich postawa „starszego brata” może zostać określona, nieco hiperbolicznie, jako kolonialna.
This article is a discussion of the poem Čech by Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–1836), which is concerned with the mythical arrival of the Czechs to their new settlements in the Bohemian basin. For early nineteenth ‑century culture this was a highly important theme with many cultural and ideological implications and contexts. The supposedly peaceful arrival of the Czechs in a deserted land appeared particularly important. In the spirit of Herder’s ideas the non-belligerent, passive nature of the Slavs appeared thus to be confirmed. Czech national culture sought to oppose this image and in several variants created the motif of the victorious battles of ‘occupation’ of the Czechs. The most radical versions even represented the mythical Czechs as victors over the roman legions – these interpretations were clearly inspired by the German legend of Arminius (Hermann) and his struggle against the legions of Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest. Mácha strips the matter of the arrival of the Czechs of external contexts. He does not specify even the nature of the enemy or the area from which the ancestral Czechs allegedly came to the Bohemia. Instead, he limits himself to a depiction of the height of the victorious battle. Three texts, highly prestigious at that time, were an inspiration to him: the Rukopis královédvorský, the poems of Ossian in Czech translation, and the Iliad of Homer. The inspirations that Mácha found here, however, he combined into a relatively sophisticated, artistically demanding form. This is particularly evident in the form and manner of using verse of this kind. Because of its artistic quality, the poem Čech, which some experts considered a later forgery, turns out really to be Mácha’s work. It can reasonably be situated in the later period of the poet’s work. This chronology also demonstrates an essential feature of Mácha’s works, in which different elements of literature (particularly patriotic and subjective elements) existed side by side. The common denominator is the author’s endeavour radically to make aesthetic motifs that were common in the period, and to create an exceptionally artistic form.
The goal of the article is to draw the basic outline of the transformations of the ballad as a genre in Czech literature in the second half of the 19th century. The material is the book editions of poetry from the year 1850 to the beginning of the World War I. The method is the synoptic-pulsating approach to a literary work of art as a dynamic process within which various discourse tendencies are configured and modified. The result is a preliminary model of Czech ballad transformation in that particular period of time: the genre happened to be in the magnetic field of Romanticism represented mainly by Erben´s Kytice (Bouquet). A number of modifications occurred in the course of time, Romanticism´s genre rules became gradually more and more relaxed, especially those related to the role of plot and dynamic motifs; one of the tendencies even inclined to parody of the traditional Romantic principles of the ballad (Mašek, Hašek). At the same time the ballad was penetrated by essential features of other literary discourses such as Parnasism (Hálek, Vrchlický), Naturalism (Sládek, Šimáček) or Decadence (Jan z Wojkowicz, Lešehrad). The transformations did not take place in a linear way, within an imaginary causal „evolution“, where individual stages would „overcome“ the previous ones, but they overlapped in synoptic dynamics. The main contribution lies in the actual proof of the thesis about the nonlinear, synoptic character of transformations of a key literary genre in the 19th century, which helped establish Romanticism and has always been so attractive for readers it has stayed vital in spite of the discourse transformations.
The study is focused on the images of Slovakia in the Czech poetry of 1860–1939, that is the idea stereotypes that had been shaped even before the rise of a common Czech-Slovak country in 1918. At that time Slovakia was perceived in a romantic way as a land with primeval nature and people untouched by the depravity of civilization. The Slovakian pursuit of linguistic and national independence was frowned upon; the historical, ethnic and political context was overlooked and Slovakia was viewed as an integral part of the Czech national project. The Czech superior “older brother” attitude towards the Slovaks may be hyperbolically assessed as colonial.
PL
Studium poświęcone jest obrazowi Słowacji w czeskiej poezji lat 1860–1939, tj. stereotypom ideowym, które ukształtowały się jeszcze przed powstaniem w 1918 roku wspólnego państwa czesko-słowackiego. Słowacja odbierana byla wtedy w duchu romantycznym jako piękna kraina z dziewiczą przyrodą i ludem niedotkniętym zepsuciem cywilizacyjnym. Negatywnie oceniano dążenie Słowaków do językowego i narodowego samostanowienia – nie uwzględniając aspektu historycznego, etnicznego i politycznego mniemano, iż Słowacja stanowi naturalną część czeskiego projektu narodowego. Odnoszenie się Czechów do Słowaków z poczuciem wyższości, ich postawa „starszego brata“ może zostać określona, nieco hiperbolicznie, jako kolonialna.
This article considers the fiction of Vítězslav Nezval (1900–1958), which, in comparison with his verse, sometimes seemed to represent a marginal area of his work. The lyrical quality of some of his fiction was also emphasized. Though these texts do not constitute an absolute dissolution of the story into lyric verse, they do reveal a number of features of the traditional epic model, which Nezval, however, uses in new contexts, with new functions. The key point is the frame-like nature of the fictional world, which oscillates between the “possible” and “impossible.” Subsequently there is a considerable increase in the role of the switching mechanism from level to level of the text structure, and in the role of the narrator, who highlights the two fundamental levels. A stream of associations then moves to the foreground, often expressed in distinctively stylized poetic language. On the other hand, apart from the well-known and often-noted analogies with the work of Proust, one finds in Nezval’s fiction a number of intertextual references to the tradition of the novel from Flaubert to Meyerink; above all it is the strong, evident inspiration of Trivialliteratur. Nezval, however, employing the schematic approaches of Trivialliteratur, plays a game, often verging on parody and the absurd, and principally, maintaining tension between verisimilitude and fantasy. This dualism, on the boundary between reality and fiction, to which the reader is led and where the action takes place and the characters move, seems to be a fundamental feature of Nezval’s epic model.
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