The artist-painter Zdenka Braunerová, as patriotic as she was immersed in European culture, was the incarnation of Bohemian qualities for Paul Claudel. Her personal, spiritual, and artistic devotion to the poet provided him with access to the Czech Baroque.
Claudelʼs geopolitics are torn between the founding myth of a Catholic central Europe, agitated by heresy and schism, and a disenchanted and melodramatic realism. His writing incorporates his lived experience of Bohemia in Prague, then of Poland in Germany, in order to idealize it in his spiritual poetry, critique it in his diary, and reveal its tragic impasses in his theater.
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