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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]

This study examines representativeness by compiling a sample of translations for textual analyses and a sample of translators for interviews. The process of achieving representativeness is exemplified by reporting on each case. The investigation is grounded in ongoing research on the strategies of literary translation from English to Czech that combines comparative text analyses and biographical interviews. The research objective is to generalise the strategies to the level of Czech literary translation norms. It is thus necessary to work with samples that are (1) representative to allow for such a level of generalisation and (2) of sizes that enable feasible analyses and interviews (i.e. the samples are not too extensive). The applied methodology pursues the fulfilment of both conditions through the three following steps: (a) Determination of the target population size and calculation of the sample size through statistical methods, (b) creation of a representative sample through probability sampling, analysis, and description, and (c) purposive sampling to obtain samples of texts and translators that represent the research intent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using close reading of Kundera's texts, Jan Čulík argues that many arguments in Milan Kundera's literary works are deliberate provocations. Kundera's approach is undoubtedly related to post-modernism, although he used his mystification techniques long before the arrival of postmodernism, as early as in the Stalinist 1950s when he published fake quotes from Lenin in official Stalinist publications. In Jan Čulík's view, it is the purpose of Milan Kundera's systematic use of false facts, distortions and disrupted logic to warn his readers against against the unreliability of words and human communication. Kundera seems to argue that the world in its complexity is basically unknowable and the only thing that is left for us is, in despair, in our ignorace of what is going on around us, to carry out pranks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Czech post-war avant-garde is split between collective enthusiasm, the adoration of the masses, and the depiction of the lone individual in crisis. Interpretations of this period have until now been based on the opposition ofLiterární skupina(the ‘Literary Group’, with an expressionist, individualist platform) vs.Devětsil(with an avant-gardist, collectivist platform). This study examines how understanding of the terms ‘expressionist’ and ‘avant-garde’ changed in the period in whichLiterární skupinaandDevětsilemerged, followed by literary historical reflections on this process during the 1960s and 1970s, whenLiterární skupinacame to be seen as distinct from the avant-garde on the basis of its espousal of expressionism. By comparing theoretical discourse and literary texts — in particular, hitherto overlooked avant-garde short prose — the present article examines the extent to which these established oppositions are valid. This article argues that expanding the analysis to include the neglected genre of the short story brings greater nuance to the underlying opposition of ‘expressionism vs. avant-garde’ (and individualism vs. collectivism), and thereby challenges standard interpretations of the era in question. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It has become difficult to evaluate and gauge the extent of the ever-expanding Czech literary web. This article focuses on analyzing the current status of the Czech literary web and associated online repositories. For purposes of this article, the author examined twenty open access Czech sites whose subject matter is Czech literature. Out of these twenty websites, the author analyzed five sites in great detail. The data for the analysis was extracted initially in December of 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established Czech precedent has made the town of Terezín an important literary symbol of Holocaust memory, used in the 1960s to construct myths of Czech innocent victimhood. Jáchym Topol’s novel,The Devil’s Workshop(2009), returns to the theme with great originality, avoiding such myths by using a compromised first-person Czech narrator, who is involved in setting up ‘dissident’ commemorative museums at Terezín and in Belarus. These draw on documented accounts of real atrocities for their authenticity. Competitive in national terms, commercialized, and ethically compromised, they are finally, arguably inevitably, silenced. Topol’s ‘truth-telling’ is discussed in the context of Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of committed Holocaust literature, Benedict Anderson’s interpretation of museums as commercialized constructions of nationality, and Timothy Snyder’s historical account of the killings in Eastern Europe; the ambiguous pessimism of his novel stands up well to criticism and, it is argued, has lessons even for historians of the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to evaluate and address the limits of an existing approach to the analysis of the thematic concentration of text. To overcome these limits, the article proposes and applies both a modification of the measurement of thematic concentration – known as secondary thematic concentration and proportional thematic concentration – and methods for their statistical testing. The results show that the modification, as well as the application of the proposed tests, enhances the possibilities for analysing the thematic characteristics of text. The article uses 20 Slovak texts of the same genre written by one author. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the Czech cliché 'the heart of Europe' and its sentimentalization. It ends by linking the Czech heart with another nationalist symbol, the heart-leaved linden. The article derives the nationalist symbolism of the heart from medieval Saxon mysticism and its descendants, the Baroque cult of the Sacred Heart, taking in Cupid and his arrows on the way. Sources from the seventeenth to the twentieth century include belles-lettres, but also political writing from the Romantic historian Palacký to Václav Havel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1945-46 expulsion of Bohemian Germans and the subsequent colonization of the Czech borderlands both stemmed from the rationalist, utopian pursuit of purity and perfection that pervades twentieth-century history. Intrinsic to that pursuit is the attempt to eradicate guilt, which can be readily seen in Czech responses to the expulsions and the social and environmental devastation of the post-war borderlands. Beginning with the principle of 'collective guilt' used to justify the expulsions, Czech political, academic, and media rhetoric, schoolbooks, international collusion, and collective amnesia have perpetuated the dominant myth of the Czechs as victims, while seeking to discredit any suggestion of Czech guilt. Key novels from the first wave of Czech literature about the post-war borderlands - Sedlmayerová's The house on the green hill (1947) and R ˇezácˇ's Advance (1951) - explicitly show the suppression of guilt in action. This suppression is also evident in the imprisonment, soon after the 1948 Communist takeover, of the journalist Michal Maresˇ, who in 1946 and 1947 accused the state of both encouraging and covering up criminal conduct in the borderlands, thereby embedding criminality in the fabric of the emerging new society. Since the 1970s, a minority of Czech intellectuals have called on the Czech nation to confront this 'embedded' guilt as a step towards 'self-healing'. The origins of this perspective can be found in Jaroslav Durych's God's Rainbow (1969) and Josef Jedlicˇka's In the Midway of This Our Mortal Life (1966), both written in and about post-war North Bohemia in the 1950s. While Durych reasserts the place of guilt within the traditional Christian model of repentance, atonement, reconciliation and absolution, Jedlicˇka reflects the more fashionable Existentialist view of guilt as an inescapable part of the human condition. Their histories of publication and receptions show the extent to which their messages have been misunderstood and misrepresented. Their reincorporation into the mainstream, together with Maresˇ, as part of renewed reflection on the fragile concept of guilt, is vital to current efforts to complicate Czech understandings of their post-war history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the relationship between two of the most significant Czech writers of the early twentieth century, Richard Weiner (1884-1937) and Karel Čapek (1890-1938), this article sets their divergent developmental paths into the context of broader issues within European Modernism as a whole. The re-emergence of 'allegory' as privileged aesthetic category - represented prominently by Walter Benjamin's work in the 1920s - characterizes a cultural phenomenon that can be termed 'melancholy Modernism'. Weiner and Čapek's contrasting responses to this melancholy allegorical impulse trace a fundamental fault line within the philosophical and historical development of Modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the changes in two novels, Zdenňka Bezděková's Říkali mi Leni and Marie Majerová's Bruno, made once the Communist-Party regime in Czechoslovakia was firmly established. For example, German paedophilia is changed to bullying in Bezděková and pre-war Czech political antisemitism deleted from Majerová. In both works Czech nationalist misoteutonism is changed into internationalist Communism. The author pays close attention to changes in language and style in both works. Though Majerová's novel seems no longer to be read, Bezděková's remains standard reading for adolescents, and in the twenty-fi rst century continues to be read with its somewhat rabble-rousing afterword by the novelist Karl Nový. The essay demonstrates how children can be made into things rather than people for the sake of a political ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Six hundred years of Czech writing are documented in The New York Public Library's holdings. The article shows how ideas traveled from century to century in the Czech lands and who transmitted those ideas. Examples from the collection are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Six hundred years of Czech writing are documented in The New York Public Library's holdings. The article shows how ideas traveled from century to century in the Czech lands and who transmitted those ideas. Examples from the collection are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the gendering of nationalist discourse and ethnic stereotypes in early 20th-century Czech literature, gender and nationalism in modern Czech culture, and modernist masculinity.

Discusses the depiction of sexuality in the novels of Czechoslovakian author Milan Kundera. Role of sexuality as a vehicle for expressing interwoven threads of commentary upon human characteristics; Presentation of characters' innermost concerns and desires; Examples of the farcical nature of human existence according to Kundera.