A Short Survey of Czech Literature

James Naughton


EARLY HISTORY AND WRITING TO THE 18^TH CENTURY


The Slavs are supposed by archaeologists to have arrived in the general area in about the 6th
century AD. Both Bohemia and Moravia received their Christianity mainly from the West; the medieval
literary influences were thus predominantly Latin and German, but also French and Italian. There
was also the linguistically and culturally important mission of Cyril and Methodius to the Moravian
prince Mojmír in the 9th century. These two Slav brothers from Salonika are credited with the
creation of the Church Slavonic liturgy, which was soon expelled from Moravia, was practised for a
while in Bohemia, but which struck permanent root in Bulgaria, the Slav Balkans and Kievan Russia.

Bohemia and Moravia were subsequently ruled, up to the 14th century, by the native Bohemian
Přemyslid dynasty, founded, as the story goes, when the nobility could no longer bear to be ruled
by a woman, Princess Libuše, who told them to follow her horse, till it led them to her
husband-to-be Přemysl, ploughing his field. Had he completed his job before they arrived, many a
later disaster in national annals would perhaps never have occurred, and the course of Czech
literature might have been quite different - one thinks especially of the nineteenth-century
historical novel, so often lamely derivative of the work of Walter Scott, and associated in Czech
readers’ minds above all with the prolific figure of Alois Jirásek (1851-1930). Jirásek is
nevertheless still enjoyed for books such as Staré pověsti české, 1894 (Old Czech Legends, 1992),
retelling these ancient tales of Libuše, of the eponymous patriarchal tribal leader Czech arriving
with his people, Moses-like upon the Mount of Říp in Northern Bohemia, of the Amazon-like Wars of
the Maidens, and so on – legends of foundation, prophecy, etc, which began their process of
detectable creation, accumulation, and mythopoeic refashioning in medieval Latin works such as
Cosmas’s Chronica Boëmorum of the early 12th century. By this time, Latin had ousted the relatively
short-lived presence of Church Slavonic writing, which had co-existed with it for a while, latterly
at the eleventh-century Sázava Monastery, south of Prague. Its texts include legends of St
Wenceslas (‘Václav’ in modem Czech), that ‘Good King Wenceslas’ of the 19th-century English carol,
murdered in 935 by his brother Boleslav, and soon turned into the national patron saint.

The literary tastes of the medieval Kings, later imperial electors, reflected both the often
prominent role of Bohemia as part of that loose conglomerate, the Holy Roman Empire, and the
large-scale immigration from Germany beginning in the 13th century, involved in trade, rich silver
mines and the foundation of many towns. A number of German poets spent some time in Bohemia under
the Přemyslid Kings, and later during the reigns of John of Luxembourg and his son the Emperor
Charles IV, a strong patron of the Church and the arts, and founder of Prague University in 1348.
Indeed, what is perhaps the outstanding masterpiece of pre-Reformation German prose, Ackermann aus
Böhmen (Husbandman from Bohemia), was composed here by a Bohemian German, Johannes von Tepl
(cl350-c1414), in about 1400. A continuous tradition of Czech vernacular writing had also
established   itself,   however,   from   the   late   13th   century   (with   earlier manuscript
glosses),  and this produced a remarkable spectrum of 14th-century writing in Czech, by far the
widest of any Slav vernacular literature at that time, ranging from the vigorous ‘Dalimil’
chronicle and legends of the saints, especially Život svaté Kateřiny (The Life of St Catherine),
to satires, courtly love poems and chivalrous romances, including a long and long-undervalued
Tristram a Izalda (Tristan and Isolde). Drastic, punning medieval humour is represented by texts
such as Mastičkář (The Quacksalver), in which a quack purveys dubious ointments to the Marys of the
Easter story who visit Jesus’s tomb (an English translation exists, and an idea of some of the
other texts can be obtained in A.  French’s bilingual Anthology of Czech Poetry).

Prose of the late 14th and early 15th centuries includes medieval classics such as the Trojan
Chronicle and Marco Polo, the theological prose of Tomáš ze Štítného (cl335-cl409), and a long,
luxuriant and effusive Czech text inspired by the German Ackermann, known as Tkadleček (The
Weaver), c1407. The work takes the form of a dispute between a Lover (the weaver-of-words) and
Misfortune (Death in Ackermann), who has deprived him of his mistress (not, as in Ackermann, his
wife). This period also gave rise, as in England, to the first complete vernacular Czech Bible. It
is thought to have been initiated by Charles’s court in the 1360s, while, in the reign of his son
Wenceslas IV, reformist preachers, the most famous among them Jan Hus (c1371-14l5), influenced by
the English Wyclif, laid the theological, if not the social, groundwork for the Hussite Wars, which
followed the burning of Hus at the stake for heresy at Constance. Apart from all the later national
literary and dramatic myth-making centred around Hussitism, for which we ought not to blame him
(most of it is anyway inaccessible to the English reader), Hus contributed to the Czech language
his clear straightforward register and avoidance of archaisms; his name is also linked with the
adoption of diacritic marks in Czech spelling to distinguish different sounds (š for 'sh', č for
'tch', etc).

The years of Hussite conflict with the Church, religious factions and fanaticism, intermingled in a
complex way with social resentments (in which anti-German feeling was by no means absent). All this
led to a literature dominated by moral didacticism, warlike hymns, and pamphleteering satires.
Among these, the Czech prose of Petr Chelčický's (c1390-1460) Siet fiery (Net of Faith), c1440-43,
stands out sharply. A pacifist proponent of primitive,   biblical Christianity,   against the
official hierarchy of society, Chelčický was recognized by Tolstoy as a forerunner of his own
thinking. Secular Renaissance influences are visible in scholarship, in book printing (which
reached Bohemia before 1500), in Latin poets, but are prominent only in a few imaginative authors
such as Hynek z Poděbrad (c1450-92), son of King George of Poděbrady, author of erotic verse and a
collection of bawdy Boccaccio stories. Another ‘unserious’ amusing text, Frantovy práva (Franta's
Laws),  1518, from the beer town of Plzeň, surviving in only one printed copy, makes up
disreputable guild-like rules for everyday life and drinking, and tells uproariously irreverent
stories of heaven, hell and foolish husbands.

From 1526 Bohemia saw its first rulers from the Habsburg dynasty, which lasted till 1918. One was
that famous patron of the arts, sciences and pseudo-sciences, Rudolf II (Emperor from 1576-1612),
whose Prague court saw figures like the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Kepler - also the English
astrologer and magus John Dee, later depicted in the Bohemian German Gustav Meyrink's  novel Der
Engel vom westlichen Fenster, 1927 (The Angel of the West Window, 1991). Prague also the home of an
Englishwoman and fine Latin poet, Elizabeth (d 1612), who compared her fate to that of Ovid, and
married an imperial lawyer. Meyrink’s most famous novel, Der Golem, 1915 (The Golem, 1985) reminds
us again of the long-standing importance of Jewish Prague, both for its history and its culture:
the book is based on the Prague legend of the sixteenth-century Rabbi Löw, and his creation of a
golem, a clay homunculus with affinities to Frankenstein’s monster - as well as to the robots in
the 20th-century Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), 1920, whose
success in translation in the UK and the USA in the 1920s gave the word ‘robot’ to the English
language.

In 16th- and 17th-century Bohemia, like today, translation was already a vital source of literary
nourishment: imported authors included Erasmus (The Praise of Folly), Petrarch (prose), Luther,
many versions of Aesop’s fables, and so on; while biblical translation culminated in the Kralice
Bible (1579-94) of the Protestant Unity of Brethren. Travel writing was already an active genre:
the Czech aristocrat Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic (1576-1635) wrote in 1599 of his part in a
diplomatic mission to Turkey, involving imprisonment and the galleys - the work is available in
English translation. Descriptions of Elizabethan England taken from the Latin of Zdeněk Brtnický z
Valdštejna are available in The Diari of Baron Waldstein. The writer saw a play at the London Globe
theatre in 1600 - what it was, we do not know. (Shakespeare’s sea-coasted ‘deserts of Bohemia’ in
The Winter’s Tale are clearly coasts of the imagination, just as poverty-stricken artistic and
writerly ‘Bohemians’ later received their epithet from Henry Murger’s mid-nineteemh-century Scènes
de la vie de bohème, the term being earlier associated in France with gypsy vagabonds.) For more
fascinating or curious information on Anglo-Czech contacts, consult J. V. Polišenský's Britain and
Czechoslovakia: A Study in Contacts.

The Winter's Tale was performed at the wedding of Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England, to
Frederick of the Palatinate. In 1620, a brief bungled attempt by the Bohemian Estates to install
this Protestant ruler Frederick as King was defeated by the Habsburg Ferdinand II just outside
Prague, at the famous ‘Battle of the White Mountain’ (Bílá hora). This marked the start of the
Thirty Years’ War between Protestant and Catholic powers in Europe. For nationalistic Czechs, it
marked the onset of a period of national ‘Darkness’ (Temno in Czech), represented as a disaster for
the Czech language and its culture. In fact, insofar as there were grave weak points (such as
widespread indifference to vernacular culture amongst the nobility), they were there already, and
it can just as easily, in fact more easily, be argued that Czech imaginative literature derived new
impetus from the re-Catholicization, if not from the political changes.

Following the execution on Prague’s Old Town Square of twenty-seven prominent rebels, there was
large-scale confiscation of rebel landowners’ estates, royal powers were enlarged, the official use
of German alongside Czech was sanctioned, and the practice of no Christian faith other than Roman
Catholicism was permitted. Many members of the higher classes chose emigration instead of
conversion. Subsequent decades brought lengthy wars with the Turks, and aggravation of peasant
burdens, accompanied by periodic revolts. The weakening in the public status of Czech became most
apparent in the 18th century, especially when German letters began to achieve a dramatic
resurgence. (The aristocracy often preferred to cultivate French.)

Czech remained the majority language of the populace, however, and the later 17th century saw a
considerable flowering of Czech imaginative literature, including skilful sermons and lyrical
poetry, inspired by the spiritual values of renewed Roman Catholicism, full of bold emotive
effects, playful ornament and daring figures of speech. Similar stylistic traits are also apparent
in the most famous 17th-century Protestant writer, Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius) (1592-1670), born
near Uherský Brod in Moravia, and last Bishop of the Unity of Brethren. In exile from 1628, he was
famous in his day throughout Europe for his works on education and the encyclopaedic ordering of
human knowledge. In Czech he is remembered above all for his classic work of allegorical fiction
Labyrint světa a ráj srdce, 1623, 1631 (The Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart, two
translations), in which a pilgrim, wishing to see the ways of the world for himself, finds only a
monstrous chaotic labyrinth in which people absurdly delude themselves, enslave and mistreat each
other; the paradise of the heart is reached only when he returns into himself and the Christ
within. The text is full of caustic observations, on marriage, the pretensions of philosophers and
academics, and on political power. On the Catholic side one outstanding poet is the Jesuit
missionary Bedřich Bridel (1619-80), whose best known poem ‘Co Bůh? Človek?’ (‘What is God? Man?’),
1659, is powerful in its mystic use of bold metaphor, oxymoron and natural imagery: Thou art the
chasm’s base, top, / I am the smallest droplet, / Thou art the orb of the sun, / I am its tiniest
sparklet, / Thou art the very bloom’s blossom, / I am but midday’s gossamer, / To Thy dew’s dew,
new world, / I am a bubble at evening.’ Another poet was Adam Michna z Otradovic (cl600-70),
organist in Jindřichův Hradec, author of religious lyrics set to melodies, combining sensually
adroit imagery with colloquial familiarity and domesticity: you can find recordings of his
Christmas carols and other music. If subsequent decades, from the later 17th century up to the
1780s, were   not  exactly  abundant  in  works  of coherent  literary imagination, it ought
perhaps to be emphasized (as it generally is not) that a good deal of printed literature was
nevertheless published, in the form of playfully vivacious, vivid and emotive sermons and other
devotional prose and verse; there were also popular printed tales and songs, as well as folk plays,
puppet theatre, and of course a great amount of orally transmitted folksong, forming the basis for
the subsequent standard 19th-century collections by the poet Erben and, for Moravia, by František
Sušil (1804-68). Many fine traditional folksongs and ballads are obtainable in modern recordings.
There was even an early 18th-century official Czech newspaper, from 1719, albeit struggling with
only a small clientele.

The end of this period (generally known as ‘the Baroque’, a term more familiar to the English
reader in architecture and music) is signalled by a series of radical state initiatives, including
the institution, under the Empress Marie Theresa, of universal primary schools, in her Ordinance of
1774. German was taught everywhere, and was required for entering secondary schooling and
universities (where it had only recently replaced Latin), but the primary schools also brought
about general basic literary in Czech. Her son Joseph II’s decrees enlarging peasant liberties and
permitting Protestant worship followed in 1781.


In: Naughton, James (ed.). “Eastern & Central Europe.” The Czech Republic. Brighton: In Print
Publishing Ltd, 1995. 50-56