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How do contemporary Czech authors reflect on what is going in their society? This article considers the work of five Czech authors. Emil Hakl looks at contemporary Czech reality as an outsider. Jiří Hájíček produces subtle accounts of interhuman relations. Jáchym Topol is a provocative experimenter who produces fantasmagoric narratives. All these authors deal also with the traumatised past, Nazism and communism. David Zábranský has been accused of writing the first ever ‘fascist’ novel in the Czech language. Karol Sidon (Chaim Cigan) has produced a highly readable tetralogy which takes place in many different countries and many different eras, even in an alternative reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractLesbian voices and experiences have received little attention in Czech historiography: recent research has concentrated on the modern era from the 1950s. This article deepens our understanding of lesbian lives in interwar Prague. It focuses on two forgotten lesbian novels, Exiles of Love and The Third Sex, which were deliberately suppressed after 1948 by the Communist regime as examples of inferior bourgeois literature. The two authors, Lída Merlínová and Gill Sedláčková, both hailed from Prague’s cultural world (theatre and film) and were active too in the 1930s Czech movement for homosexual reform. Spanning the late twenties to the late thirties, the novels reveal tantalising glimpses of the evolving sub-culture of interwar Prague. Merlínová’s naïve novel of 1929, Exiles of Love, was the first Czech lesbian novel, and it betrayed the 1920s optimism of the ‘Czech New Woman’ who was prepared to challenge gender stereotypes. Sedláčková’s novel, The Third Sex, is a more explicit study from 1937, reflecting the more mature sub-culture but also a cynicism about the chances of homosexual reform. Yet it manages, even more than Exiles, to convey an uplifting and moral message. Indeed, both novels are about lesbian self-knowledge, exploring the scope for same-sex survival in a world where the best solution may be abroad, not in ‘provincial Prague’. In restoring these texts to lesbian literature we recover a range of voices, expressing the hopes and frustrations of some queer Czech women in an unusually liberal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Campus novel, traditionally seen as a genre of English and American literature, has recently also gained attention in non-Anglophone literary traditions. The article focuses on campus fiction written in Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian after 1989. It provides a brief introduction to the terminology and classification of the campus novel within the Anglo-American literary tradition, offering a perspective on Central European campus fiction through this lens. It traces its genre hybridity and the dominant genres with which it is associated, such as satire, social detective fiction, historical detective fiction, metafiction, biography, and the Bildungsroman. It also indicates the historical periods in which the genre is set and the traits of the professor as protagonist. While campus satire is a shared feature of Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian literature in response to political change, each national literature emphasizes themes unique to its own literary and cultural traditions. These include the founding of Polish universities, identity and the reassessment of Ukrainian professors’ lives, the ironic treatment of the communist era in Czech and Slovak literature, and metafiction in Slovak literature.

The shifting critical reception of Petra Soukupová’s prose works in the context of the debate over the “literary mainstream” This study examines the way Petra Soukupová’s works of fiction have been reviewed by literary critics from the beginning of her career up until her latest book. While she was seen as an innovative writer after her first books came out, she has subsequently been seen as the key representative of what is known as the “literary mainstream”. Although the discussion over this literary mainstream has been going on among Czech literary critics for several years now, no consensus has been reached over the definition of this label. Hence this study first looks at the concept of the literary maintstream and then examines how it has influenced the critical reception of Petra Soukupová’s fiction.

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The aim of the paper is a comparative analysis of selected aspects of the singular styles of the historical epics Sárka by Jaroslav Vrchlický (1853-1912) and Ctirad Julius Zeyer (1841-1901); classical authors of Czech literature from the so-called Lumira generation of the second half of the 19th century. The juxtaposition of thema- tically similar texts allowed for a more pronounced identification of the characteristic features of the singular styles of both poets, possibly the specificity of their historical and mythic epic poetry, ideally the stylistic dominance of the authorial styles of Jaroslav Vrchlický and Julius Zeyer in mutual comparison. In order to achieve the set objectives, the methods of comparative and mathematical stylistics were used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an innovative model of poetics (or isms, styles, etc.) in Czech prose in the latter half of the long 19th century. It gives an overview of seven indivi- dualized and mutually distinct poetics, including ideal, analytical, and psychological realisms, Parnassism, naturalism, impressionism, and decadence. The individual poetics do not represent periods, but exist in parallel, allowing confrontations and in- tersections either within the author's work or in a specific text, as in the model of Czech literature developed by Dalibor Tureček in the past decade. They are always set in the context of European literature and supported by many illustrative examples. The model is not only typological, but also assumes a diachronic perspective, which can be developed in future scholarly work on the history of Czech literature. The aim is to create a system that can potentially be applied not only to Czech fiction, but possibly also to poetry or drama, in other periods and literatures. Part Two of the article concentrates on psychological realism, Parnassism, naturalism, impressio- nism, and decadence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the hitherto unknown letters the Czech writer Egon Hostovský (1908–1973) wrote to the Norwegian writer, critic, essayist, editor and translator Sigurd Hoel (1890–1960). These letters date from 1949–1956 and are preserved in the National Library of Norway in Oslo. Not only do they provide interesting information about Hostovský’s efforts to publish his works in Scandinavia, but they also testify to a close friendship between the two writers. The article also presents two letters by Graham Greene (1904–1991) which are also preserved in the file containing Hostovský’s letters in the Norwegian National Library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a select survey of the rendering of personal names in translation into English from European languages with different scripts from the turn of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. Works of prose fiction were chosen from Czech and Icelandic, which use characters that are not part of the English alphabet. Their original publication dates are from the middle of the nineteenth to the late twentieth century, with translations trailing by years or even decades. The authors of the original works were very well known and in some cases Nobel Prize laureates. This gives assurance that their works attracted good translators and, in some cases, multiple translators. The hypothesis was that over the course of more than a century, there has been a growing tendency to respect the original spellings of personal names in translations – that is, to employ the source language’s script, even when the literary works belong to relatively peripheral European cultures. The explanations for this include increased cultural contacts, the expansion of what has traditionally been called world literature, and internet resources.

The study deals with the relationship between the leading representative of the Bohemian studies in Russia L.N. Budagová, D.Sc. (1932–2022) and the Czech town of Sobotka and to the local festival of language, speech and literature called Šrámek´s Sobotka (Šrámkova Sobotka). Based on an analysis of available sources and literature, it follows the core of the relationship defined by the years 1975–2022. Budagová got to know about the annual festival during an excursion and then she was invited to appear. Between the years 1977 and 2010, she prepared twelve lectures focused on the Czech and Russian literature, the Czech-Russian literary and cultural relations and Russian cultural realities. Her lectures and other texts about the festival are summarized in the book O literatuře and kultuře (Texty pro Šrámkovu Sobotku), published in 2012. Her next book written in Czech Z mého života s českou literaturou (Výbor z česky publikovaných prací) was published in 2021 thanks to a local initiative. It involves twenty works written between the years 1973 and 2020. Furthermore, the study deals with her articles published in the journal Zpravodaj Šrámkovy Sobotky and it analyses short articles, which were published about her there, as well. She received the Sobotka Town Award in 2012 (for a promotion of the town and the Czech culture). There is an entry regarding Budagova in the local lexicon Kdo je kdo v dějinách Sobotecka a Dolnobousovska (published in 2015). Moreover, the study includes basic information about the town and the festival for the better context and it incorporates memories of the author, as well.

The main aim of the paper is to highlight the relationship between Christianity and homosexuality based on selected fiction texts by Czech writers and poets (Zeyer, Fuks, Kuběna, Georgiev). The selected authors represent different historical periods and different currents of opinion. We are convinced that the theoretical part provides a suitable methodological basis for the part of the paper in which we discuss homosexual motives in selected works of the mentioned authors. To sum up, we can state that the explicit expression of homoerotic and other motives is only relevant today; in artistic narratives dating back to the 19th and 20th centuries, these symbols are expressed in a hidden way, and it is up to each recipient to decide whether and to what extent they see them in these narratives. Zeyer could not fully express himself; he was forced to use hidden symbols to be who he felt he was, at least in his works. Kuběna, in the context of the 1970s, treats the topic of homosexuality very openly, he is not afraid of being condemned by society. Fuks´ works are characterized by a considerable degree of autobiography. Despite Georgiev´s clear rejection of faith, a believing homosexual appears more than once in his work. In this paper we try to fill a certain gap in the field of comparative research in works of art and poems by authors who in some way tended to homosexuality because within the Czech context, we have encountered this area of scholarly articles sporadically.

The article is about the attempt to literary overcome borders in Central Europe in Jaroslav Rudis's 'railway novel' Winterbergs letzte Reise. The very old protagonist Wenzel Winterberg and his nurse and companion Jan Kraus cross long stretches of the former k.u.k. area on Winterberg's 'last crossing'. In addition to taking actual border crossings into account, the article focuses on examining the abolition of borders through the transformation of concrete places into cultural-literary spaces. In doing so, literary methods such as conversational prose etc. are considered. The recurring motif of the Battle of Königgrätz has a special function in the sense of a collective experience of suffering as a central European founding myth. It also plays a significant role for both protagonists in driving through literary places and in the memory of past border situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper strives to illuminate the forebodings of AI and automatization's impact on society in two neglected Czech treasures unavailable in English, Čestmír Vejdělek's Návrat z ráje [Return from Paradise] (1961) and Jiří Marek's Blažený Věk [The Blessed Age] (1967). The study aims to illustrate science fiction's prescience and part of Czech SF's path after Čapek, while challenging the notion that "the utopian society is a subject, perhaps even the only subject that is inaccessible to literature" (Hans Magnus Enzensberger). For these dystopian texts engage readers to imagine the positive alternative to the portrayed societies, rather than explicitly evoking eutopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines modern knowledge about non-human primates in Czech travel narratives concerning Africa and biological journals from the late nineteenth century to the end of the interwar period. Particular attention is given to the way discourse on primates and anthropological discourse mutually influenced each other. Inspired by the intersection of human -- animal studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the paper emphasizes the anthropomorphizing character of biological discourse and popular travel narratives. At the time, presentations of primates created a specific anthropological resource and, in addition, helped to naturalize the dominant racial and gender ideologies. In the context of the Austrian--Hungarian and Czechoslovakian relative inability to obtain colonial possessions in the way western powers did, the representations of anthropomorphized non-human primates can also be interpreted as a specific field where Czech colonial fantasies about dominance were expressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces exciting contemporary Czech authors, recent translations into German, and the library event series "Tschechien erlesen", which includes German-language readings and discussions with authors from the Czech Republic in public libraries in Berlin and Dresden. It shares practical tips and advice on sources of information relating to contemporary Czech literature, but also on types of support and subsidies to fund book tours with Czech authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is devoted to the issue of the mythologisation of the space of Olšany Cemetery performed by Daniela Hodrová in her trilogy Trýznivé město (City of Torment). The article consists of two parts: the first one is a theoretical introduction about the concepts of myth, cemetery and maze, and the cultural connection between them. The second part contains an analysis of Olšany Cemetery as presented in the trilogy. Hodrová depicts the cemetery as a kind of mythical space which has the nature of a maze, where the living and the dead both share the fate of being prisoners.

The question of the formation of a new type of creator-demiurge in the conditions of culture at the turn of the 19th—20th centuries is considered. Particular attention is paid to the personality of the Czech artist Josef Váchal. The relevance of the study is determined by several factors: firstly, the recent increased interest in Czech literature in Russia and, at the same time, its insufficient representation both in the book market and in the scientific community; secondly, the lack of Russian-language criticism directly devoted to the work and the author’s figure of J. Váchal. Describing the cultural and historical environment in which the creative personality of the artist was formed, the authors of the article refer both to the general European context and directly to the Czech language. It has been established that the work of J. Váchal has a deep connection with the history of his country. In particular, the artist’s reaction to certain moods prevailing in Czech society at that time explains his passion for baroque aesthetics, the cornerstone of his poetics. In addition, Váchal’s biography largely determined the themes and form of his works, so understanding him as a specific personality of the 19th-20th centuries contributes to a more detailed analysis of his work.

The article deals with the role of Jan Hus in utopian constructions of the Czech interwar literature. During this period, a “wave of utopianism” was observed in the Czech Republic, it was utopia (both negative and positive) that became an extremely convenient means for understanding the complex of problems of the young Czechoslovak republic, and at that time the national element was preferred over the social one, which is also characteristic of the Slavic utopia in general. The overwhelming majority of the of utopian works at that time was written by the authors of the second and third-rate, but it is with them the national question comes to the fore, and the simpler and more primitive from an artistic point of view the texts of such authors were, the more clearly they express collective Czech national stereotypes. In such works, Jan Hus appears as a pillar of national culture. First of all, in terms of spirituality, as an inspirer for the construction of a peaceful and just life, where the Czechs finally find their place as a people, tarnished by suffering, and secondly, as an inspirer for military exploits. The greatness of his figure for the Czechs is so massive that it accelerates the utopian fantasies of Czech authors to world (at least cultural) hegemony or helps the world cope with its main enemy — the Germans. The article analyzes the following novels: “Telephone conversation of a Czech with an inhabitant of the planet Mars” (1918) by J. Mičan, “Death of Mankind” (1928) by J. Akana, “Red Vertigo” (1921) by A.M. Tichý, “Yellows against Whites” (1925) V. O. Lučan, “The Millennium of King Matthias” (1931) J. Černoch.

Ecocriticism represents a trend of thought that has been gaining ground in the Czech academic milieu, and thinking about it raises a number of questions at the moment: whether there are any local analogues of ecocriticism, whether it makes sense to transfer the theory to the local context, and what the impact of such transfer could be. The main part of the article is devoted to the different phases of ecological consciousness in Czech literature and illustrates three of them with examples: the Romantic (Mácha, Erben, Furch), the early 20th century (Deml, Neumann) and the 1980s (Páral, Juliš). The conclusion of the article focuses on the question of the awareness of the state in these different phases and its inevitable incompleteness.

The article provides an innovative model of poetics (or isms, styles, etc.) in Czech prose in the latter half of the long 19th century. It gives an overview of seven individualized and mutually distinct poetics, including ideal, analytical, and psychological realisms, Parnassism, naturalism, impressionism, and decadence. The individual poetics do not represent periods, but exist in parallel, allowing confrontations and intersections either within the author's work or in a specific text, as in the model of Czech literature developed by Dalibor Tureček in the past decade. They are always set in the context of European literature and supported by many illustrative examples. The model is not only typological, but also assumes a diachronic perspective, which can be developed in future scholarly work on the history of Czech literature. The aim is to create a system that can potentially be applied not only to Czech fiction, but possibly also to poetry or drama, in other periods and literatures. Part One of the article concentrates on a general overview and on ideal and analytical realisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Fin-de-Siècle Europe appears in the prose of the Czech poet and writer Jiři Karasek from Lvovice (1871–1951) as a mystical space full of nostalgia and claustrophobia, which force the characters to experience the hereditary involvement of history. This is, for example, how the hero of the novel “Gothic Soul” (Czech: Gotická Duše) feels. The novel shows Prague at the turn of the century as a place where the past is more real than the present. The trilogy “Novels of the Three Magicians” (Czech: Romány tří mágů), inspired by the legends about European “sorcerers”, uses Vienna, Venice, and Prague as magic or decadent territories that affect the characters’ behaviour. Karasek creates urban images with decadent aesthetics by applying special features and techniques. Among them we can highlight the night atmosphere, intentional emphasis on the artificiality of the reality, and the description of the scene with the symbols of decline or decay. Such a subjective view from the eyes of a decadent character can open up a city from a unique perspective, making it possible to distinguish previously unseen details. The image of Prague in Karasek’s works is dual and ambivalent. On the one hand, it is an aesthetically artifi cial decadent Prague and on the other, a mystical, magical Prague. Venice by Karasek is also a decadent city where only the past is alive. With help of Karasek’s prose one can obtain the prism of decadent and “gothic” novels — rather rare and original for Czech literature genres. His works also give us the opportunity to experience the lost atmosphere of pre-war Europe.

The article proposes a hypothesis that traditional imagological concepts are no longer sufficient for interpreting the current and recent “imagological situation”. The authors argue that given the significant changes in the geopolitical ordering of the world in the post-imperial period, it is necessary to expand and internally categorize the terms to capture a more nuanced way of looking at the “other”. The article provides a summary of existing approaches and suggests innovations, particularly in making a careful distinction between the self-image of the internal and external, and the disaggregation of the “meta-image” into several layers. The authors point out that imagological research needs to consider that the ethnic identity of the recipient is not unambiguous, which problematizes the interrelation of “us” and “them”. Additionally, in post-imperialism, there is an unravelling of the former bipolar perception. The authors trace the image in the context of concepts such as image, stereotype, and brand. The essay aims to analyse the manifestations of the emerging neo-imperialism, which returns to the traditional contrasting delineation of “our” and “the foreign”. It also examines the factor of evaluation and the question of fictionality. The effectiveness of the new approaches is demonstrated in a Russian-Czech comparative analysis of selected novels by Vladimir Sorokin and Jáchym Topol. The authors perceive the current geopolitical processes as an opportunity for improving the imagological methodology and imagology as an effective tool for interpreting the contemporary world.

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The study deals with the thematisation of Jewishness in the inter-war prose writing of four authors from assimilated Jewish families: Richard Weiner (born 1884), František Langer (born 1888), Karel Poláček (born 1892) and Egon Hostovský (born 1908). Whereas the prose of the last-named author has received considerable attention in contemporary literary history, in the case of the remaining authors their Jewishness remains on the periphery of scholarly interest, or is mentioned in works of a synthetic character. A detailed reading of the work of all three prose writers reveals that for them Jewish culture did not represent an essential literary theme, and indeed they barely mentioned it whatsoever. An exception relates to the abundant references to anti-Semitism in Karel Poláček’s cycle of novels about the provincial town, which can be explained among other factors by the aggravated political situation in the second half of the 1930s.

In the Czech culture of the turn of the 20th century we can see the phenomenon of the orientalising of the Jewish populace, in which the archetype of the beautiful Jewess (la belle Juive) occupied a significant and somewhat different position. This study examines types of depiction of the beautiful Jewess in travelogues and fictional literature, and divides these tendencies into three types. The beautiful Jewess is construed by means of biblical similes and antecedents, while these often concern heavily eroticised representations that are not based on a biblical template but rather arise out of the imagination of the authors of the 19th century. The erotic subtext plays a fundamental role also in the case of the second tendency, though here the primary precursor is not a biblical figure or narrative, but the fictional character in the story rather represents a unique existence, without direct and determining intertextual ties. This type of beautiful Jewess is characterised by a significant borderline role between the Orient and the Occident, and at the same time in the narratives she also occupies the role of a tragic figure. The final tendency is to conceive the beautiful Jewess negatively, in which the narrative accentuates her use of her beauty in order to pursue her own selfish interests. Among other factors, the study examines modes of the orientalising of beautiful Jewesses, and reflects upon whether they concern positive or negative representations.

Philip Roth made no secret of his great admiration for the work of Franz Kafka, which ultimately brought him to Prague in the 1970s and fostered his interest in Czech culture. This contribution focuses on the reception of the personality and work of Franz Kafka in Philip Roth’s non-fiction writing. The first section focuses on Roth’s essential Kafkaesque essay ‘“I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”; or Looking at Kafka’ from 1973, in which Roth combines an empathetic portrait of his favourite author with a counterfactual vision of Kafka’s life, in which the author of the Trial and the Castle did not die of tuberculosis and instead fled from the Holocaust to the United States, where he became Roth’s uncle. In the second section, based on Roth’s dialogue with Ivan Klíma from 1990, we document how Kafka serves Roth in his reflections on the position and role of the writer in society.

Was Ignác Cornova’s contribution to Czech-language literature only that of a historian? In the 1770s and 1780s he also happened to be the most acclaimed poet in Bohemia. Of the many reactions to Cornova’s work from German and Czech writers, this study focuses on Nábožné písně pro ka­tolického měšťana a sedláka k veřejným a domácím službám božím (Religious Songs for the Catholic Townsman and Countryman for Use in Public and Domestic Divine Service, 1791) by Václav Stach, with a verse dedication to Cornova. It emphasises that under the Habsburg monarchy the genre of religious songs and hymns was also a platform for forming a new readership and literary public, providing a ve- hicle for writers such as Michael Denis, Ignaz Cornova, Johann Peter Hofmann and Václav Stach himself for creative experimentation and a mutually beneficial communication of their work to the public. In this context, our study examines the conceptual and aesthetic links between Stach and the poetic models of Ignác Cornova.

The 1990s represented a decade marked by the fall of communism and the emergence of a free and capitalist society in Czechoslovakia (and its successor, the Czech Republic). With the passage of time, the motifs of the decade's memories begin to show in Czech prose; the literary representations of the memory of the 1990s can be usually found, among others, in the works of authors of the young generation who lived in the post-revolutionary period during their childhood or adolescence. In our study, through the analysis of excerpts from novels written by authors from this generation, we observed and characterized the different modes of this collective memory, in which nostalgia predominates, but social criticism and signs of trauma can be found as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a hypothesis that traditional imagological concepts are no longer sufficient for interpreting the current and recent "imagological situation". The authors argue that given the significant changes in the geopolitical ordering of the world in the post-imperial period, it is necessary to expand and internally categorize the terms to capture a more nuanced way of looking at the "other". The article provides a summary of existing approaches and suggests innovations, particularly in making a careful distinction between the self-image of the internal and external, and the disaggregation of the "meta-image" into several layers. The authors point out that imagological research needs to consider that the ethnic identity of the recipient is not unambiguous, which problematizes the interrelation of "us" and "them". Additionally, in post-imperialism, there is an unravelling of the former bipolar perception. The authors trace the image in the context of concepts such as image, stereotype, and brand. The essay aims to analyse the manifestations of the emerging neo-imperialism, which returns to the traditional contrasting delineation of "our" and "the foreign". It also examines the factor of evaluation and the question of fictionality. The effectiveness of the new approaches is demonstrated in a Russian-Czech comparative analysis of selected novels by Vladimir Sorokin and Jáchym Topol. The authors perceive the current geopolitical processes as an opportunity for improving the imagological methodology and imagology as an effective tool for interpreting the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The study analyses the reception of Petra Hůlová’s literary work in Poland with a focus on her publishers’ activities. The writer’s books have been published in two different publishing houses – W.A.B., one of the biggest fiction publishers in Poland, and Afera, small publishing house founded by bohemist and translator Julia Różewicz. The author of the paper – basing on the publishers’ strategies and the reviews of critics and readers – describes the influence of this transition on the perception of Petra Hůlová’s works in Poland and on the position of both writer and publisher in Polish literary field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The functional emancipation of the professional status of women became one of the pivotal social themes of the first decade of building state socialism in Czechoslovakia. A newly discovered fragment of correspondence between the writer Helena Dvořáková (1895–1970), author of neorealistic psychologizing women’s novels, and the Nestor of Czech art history and conservation Zdeněk Wirth (1878–1961) points retrospectively to this gender-oriented debate also taking place in an informal form between representatives of the post-war cultural elites. In her letter of June 1954, Dvořáková refers to a social gathering at the Olympia Café, where she witnessed a discussion between the leading art historians Zdeněk Wirth and Emanuel Poche (1903–1987), in which they questioned the contribution of women in the field of intellectual culture. In the fifty years that women have had access to higher education, “they never invented gunpowder”, someone said during the discussion. As an unintended witness to the event, Dvořáková sets herself against similar accusations not only in the correspondence under review, but above all in her literary work, the leitmotif of which became the fortunes and social status of – among others – educated, academically established – women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Culture Context / Konteksty Kultury is the property of Jagiellonian University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The use of silence to characterize the dominant response of occupied populations during the Second World War recurs throughout post-war European literature and is especially prominent in Czech writing. Interpreting the meaning of this silence therefore became central to Czech efforts to establish a preferred narrative about the German occupation in the immediate post-war period. Through analysis of the motif in more and less well-known works published between 1940 and 1946, I shall map the narrowing understanding of the silence of the occupied from its varied, ambiguous portrayal in the now forgotten first Czech novel about the Occupation, Silences by Josef Horal, to its unequivocal interpretation as resistance in Jan Drda's canonical The Mute Barricade. While this narrowing reflects Tony Judt's notion of a "collective amnesia" necessary for national unity and recovery, the marginalization of certain perspectives also presages the broader move in Czech post-war society away from pluralism to nationalist authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the role of historical fiction in Czech literature since the year 2000 and analyzes the depiction of history within the genre of family saga and novel chronicle based on the example of the first two volumes of Karin Lednická's intended trilogy Šikmý kostel (2020, 2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]