Ivo Pospíšil: Central Europe: Substance and Concepts. Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Faculty of Central European Studies, Nitra 2015, 169 s. ISBN 978-80-558-0856-7, EAN 9788055808567. Central Europe: Substance and Concepts Ivo Pospíšil Institute of Central European Languages and Cultures Faculty of Central European Studies University of Constantine the Philosopher NITRA 2015 TABLE of CONTENTS I. Central Europe: Basic Notions A. Central Europe in the Framework of Area Studies B. European and World Areas and Central Europe II. Central Europe and the Phenomenon of Homo Europae Centralis A. Europe and Central Europe: synchrony and diachrony B. Central Europe: The Notion and the Range C. Central Europe as a Geopolitical, Cultural and Spiritual Space D. Does the Phenomenon of Central Europe and Homo Europae centralis Exist? A Small Case Study Ljuba Vondroušková‘s Poetic Creation: a Russian poetess in Central Europe A Small Remark on the Margin Vietnamese Imigration in Central Europe E. The Prospects of Central Europe III. Basic Information about the Course Central Europe: Substance and Conceptions IV. Central Europe – Terminology - Selection V. TESTS and TASKS for the Course VI. A Selection of the Author’s Studies in Central European Subjects A. The Slavonic Romanticism and Its Research: Specific Features, the Past and the Present B. Prolific Faltering in F. X. Svoboda‘s Prose and Its International Context C. The Russian and the Czech-German Gothic Link: Fragments of Development and Comparison D. The Danger of Loneliness: the New „Splendid Isolation“ (Some Remarks Concerning the Transformation of Culture and Humanities as a Global Process) E. Peter Demetz: A Conversation with René Wellek A SELECTED LIST OF RECOMMENDED LITERATURE Appendices Maps Austro-Hungary Bucovina/ Bukowina, a Romanian map Galicia German lands Silesia The American edition of Milan Kundera’s essay The Tragedy of Central Europe, 1986. Central Europe Programme 2020 Central Europe Programme 2020 http://www.interreg-central.eu/central-documents/programme-documents/ I. Central Europe: Basic Notions A. Central Europe in the Framework of Area Studies The methodological starting point of the research of area studies and Central Europe which should enrich philologies and the teaching of languages and literatures was primarily the Brno project going back to the mid-1990s of the integrational genre and comparative typology, the traditional Brno conception of poetology and the study of literary currents, streams and tendencies, and, of course, area-philological conception in the form of case studies, a cluster of approaches going back not only to the American area studies as part of Sovietology from the years of the cold war and iron curtain policy, but also to Josef Dobovský and the autochthonous Slavonic studies of the 18th and 19th centuries not speaking about the roots of French mercantilism and economic teachings studying the whole geopolitical area. The problem of area studies consists not only in the enrichment of philology from the point of view of information and contextual background, but also in the strengthening of the philological kernel and the neighbouring cluster of different disciplines overcoming the philological isolation and, moreover, in practical purposes. A traditional philologist rarely deals with economy, politics and international relations. The old-fashioned concept of life and institutions seems to be usatisfactory nowadays. The concept of area studies also strengthens the former philological unity motivating linguistics and literary criticism to a more intensive mutual cooperation. The language represents the basic material for literature, iterature is a representative space for the development of language; each language is being realised through literary texts, it is its mode of existence. Unlike traditional philology, the area concept is based on the study of the cultural space which is heterogeneous covering all from the natural and social framework towards sexual life. Therefore philology has to be completed by sociology, political science, philosophy, psychology, gender studies, the concept of post-colonial culture etc. It is evident that both languages and literatures do not cover the cultural space/area completely; on the other hand the cultural area speaks various cultural languages and their products (texts). Though area studies are generally respected now – in spite of the traditionalists’ resistence -, but very often are being realised through history and historians or political science and its representatives. It is high time we started to conceive area studies not as a new religion, but as a practical cognitive tool. The negative evaluation of area studies is usually connected with the fact that sometimes they function as a sort of a litter bin, i. e. a sphere of everything, a kind of a mixture, a mess of all and nothing at the same time. This is nothing new as new scholarly disciplines have the same „biography“. They have to define the object of their research and the discipline’s borders which concern information science, newly conceived political science, international relations etc. The accentuation of space/zonal relations is, of course, not new (Gaston Bachelard, Mircea Eliade, Mikhail Bakhtin, his concept of the chronotope). The boundaries of area studies are associated with their range and with the problem of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, i. e. with the search for a new object, a specific „craft“ typical of a new discipline, the knowledge of „know-how“ techniques which are well-known from natural and technological sciences, but also from some social sciences and humanities. Sometimes it is asserted that new disciplines are a sort of a fake, false sciences which have no disctinctive limits; each discipline has to have a certain amount of basic knowledge and approaches, sometimes mythologized, i. e. in mathematics, medicine, philology etc. connected with certain subjects the students are usually afraid of, say, anatomy in medicine or historical grammar or syntax in linguistics. This all has to be formulated in the course of the establishing of this new discipline called area studies or philological-area studies. This is all closely connected with the relations between philology and social sciences; if the kernel of area studies is represented by philology, we call them “philological-area studies”); the discipline represents a specific form of a transcendence of philology towards social sciences; at the same time the philological kernel of area studies has to be preserved. The area character is not a mere mechanical synthesis or a solution of philology and social sciences, but a natural transcendence of philology. It is inevitable to ignore a fashion od area studies, i. e. a non-critical accentuation of everything which is closely connected with area or space conceptions at any cost; on the contrary, it is extremely useful to stress their connections with other disciplines or notions; area or philological-area studies should be associated with the following terms, such as visualization[1], history of ideas (Ideengeschichte), the theory of literary history, the dialogue of cultures[2], culture/cultural studies. B. European and World Areas and Central Europe The concept of the net of world cultural areas depends on how detailed and elaborate it should be. The typology of world cultural areas could be identified with that of continents, e. g. North, Central or North America, Asia subdivided into Western, Southern, Eastern or South-Eastern, Australia and Oceania, Africa subdivided due to natural contiditions, ethnicity or religion into different regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, Muslim Africa etc. The kernel of European areas is closely associated with their complicated history and cultural development with its language heterogeneity and old and new contrasts and contradictions. Traditionally speaking, there are Western Europe, Northern Europe or Scandinavia, Southern Europe, the Balkan, Central Europe, East and South-Eastern Europe; it is usual to speak of the Mediterranean area. The Central European area represents the most complicated cultural complex, the region with colourful historical and religious developments, the cradle of revolutions and world wars. It reminds a little of the Balkan area though its intrinsic structure – both diachronous and synchronous is quite different. There is nothing stable in the typology of areas in general and European areas in particular; though the formation of cultural areas is a long-time process, there are some important shifts and modifications; one possible example might be represented by Italy: a centre of Renaissance and humanism naturally belonged to West European area in the Middle Ages; its Renaissance concept was then realised in France and England, later when the kernel of Italian culture – the North of Italy with Milan and Venice – became part of Habsburg monarchy – Italy was regarded as part of Central Europe. We can even conclude that very important parts of Central European area have a transitive character: besides Italy, for example, Slovenia (Central Europe – Balkan), former Galicia, now partly Poland, partly Ukraine (Central Europe – Eastern Europe), Transylvania (Siebenbürgen, Erdély, Ardeal – Central Europe - Balkan), Croatia (Central Europe – Balkan) etc. The transitiveness may function as a distinctive feature of the whole of Central Europe which gives it a more flexible, rich, complex and synthetic character leading to its really “central” position, and the rest of European areas which, of course, tended to transcend to other countries and determine their chatacters (former African colonies – Britain, France, up to 1918 Germany, then also Portugal, Spain, colonies in Asia, America). It is also often stressed in recent individual or team publication dealing with the problem of aesthetic values, with rather the controversial subject of “East-Central Europe” (Ostmitteleuropa) or the comparative aspect of area studies in general and Central European studies in particular.[3] From this point of view it is very important to accentuate the significance of the axiological character of literary artefacts, to integrate the area studies also into the concept of comparative philological studies. The contemporary literary history must also cover the theory of aesthetic values though it is not acceptable to apply here a concept of the so-called positive discrimination. No literary cannon can be determined by the representatives of single national literatures only, literature is a supranational phenomenon as part of the communicative process predetermined by the category of the recipient (reader); the product of the process – a literary text – is being mediated through the receptional environment, e. g. translations etc.). In some of the studies dealing with area studies in general and Central European area in particular you can find a term „belatedness“ which is a little pejorative, negatively axiological. Each national literature has it own developmental paradigm, its trajectory of evolution independent on other litreratures, so there is no need to gain on or overcome something, it is autonomous, prepared to be integrated with other literary entities, to transform their impulses, but otherwise it has its own evolutinary rhythm and pattern, it is axiologically autochthonous. In some articles of mine I called it „pre-post effect“ or „pre-post paradox“. The term „literary culture“ brings us a little back to the 19th-century cultural-historical school denying the specificity of literature as a kind of arts stressing the importance of cultural studies, semiotics and spatial character of the knots of intersection of various cultural streams and tendencies. The key relations of area studies including Central European studies covering the cardinal problem of area comparative studies, cultural studies, dialogue of cultures, and genre studies is very close to the yet unsolved problem of the extrinsic and the intrinsic mentioned in the Theory of Literature by A. Warren and mainly by R. Wellek[4], the interconnection of which is a dominant task of literary criticism including its area aspect. II. Central Europe and the Phenomenon of Homo Europae Centralis A. Europe and Central Europe: synchrony and diachrony In the framework of integrational processes in Europe it is inevitable to take into account, above all, its multinational and multicultural nature. It is very difficult to cope with the so-called national question, with the problem of national identity which is linked even with biological entities, with the biological substance of mankind, not only with sociological and psychological determinants as it is often expressed in special literature concerning this problem. Hundreds of years of human evolution, sometimes even cataclysmic, and therefore often disjointed – were forming the patterns of behaviour and action which cannot be ignored (distrust between ethnic groups and nations based on language, cultural and civilisational differences, the manifestations of hostility, instincts of national or tribal self-preservation, genocidal etc.); some political systems have taken use of these stereotypes and patterns of behaviour (nationalism), some others tried to suppress them, but sooner or later capitulated, regarding them as a black box, tabood them or tried to use them in their fight for the control over the whole world (Nazism, communist movement, military-industrial complex, various secret societies, guilds or fraternities, some playing with the third world card). The tactics of tabooing and concealing, or using euphemisms in the framework of political correctness seem to be – at least in Europe –fruitless, unproductive: while in the U.S.A. the violent anti-segregational policy could have led to acceptable results – at least at that time (the 1960s) – in Europe the situation - due to a more complex histora and historical peripeteias and paradoxes was much more complicated. Besides the effort to make big wholes or complexes there are still new and new attempts at splitting, dividing, more or less traditional or, on the other hand, brand-new: traditional dichotomy of the West and the East and the North and the South which everybody understands in a different way, brand-new nationalisms, the rise of new standard languages and religious confessions, new ideological currents connected with violence and terrorism. If we decide to give as an example the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the Czech lands after the adoption of the Latin rite belong to the West, but for a long time they still belonged rather to the European geopolitical crossroads as big parts of Moravia and Silesia and the whole of Slovakia belong - geologically speaking, from the point of view of nature, civilization and culture more to the Mediterranean area while the West of Moravia (the area of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands) and the whole of Bohemia to the Euroatlantic space, to Western Europe. For example, for the French we are apparently in the East; speaking in other words: Prague belongs to the East while Helsinki to the West; that is, of course, the past political division which nowadays is not valid yet, does not correspond to geopolitical reality. The Ukrainians, for example, or Byelorusians, more often their intellectual élites, do not feel to be part of the East or regard themselves being part of Central Europe; the East is understood, prevalently, as Russia or rather only its Asian part or Asia as such. On the other hand, in Western Europe there are the research institutes of oriental studies dealing both with the Czech Republic and with China as with oriental (Eastern) countries. In this respect, the opinions of common citizens of the EU cannot be easily unified: there will be differences between those uttered by a citizen from the so-called older EU countries and those defended by those from the new ones, and there might be also, moreover, the differences between, say, Poland and the Czech Republic. The opinions held by common citizens are more representative and simply more truthful than those held by diplomats and their governments. Historically speaking, it si obvious that the whole of Europe belonged to the Mediterranean civilizational sphere which has its origins in Eastern Mediterranean, so rather in Western Asia, but it is impossible to deny a further split, e. g. the Arabian invasion, the Christian Church schism going back to 1054, the Mongol-Tartar invasion in the 13th century etc. These integrational-disintegrational tendences wrinkled the European body and face, and their results can be seen even nowadays. The Central Europe cannot be understood without Europe or the United Europe. Such conceptions did exist also in the remote past and naturally in modern times. If we omit the Hellenic Empire of Alexander od Macedon with Greek as a principal cultural language covering the Mediterranean area up to Persia, Egypt and Central Asia, there is, above all, the Saint Roman Empire (later „of the German nation“) which had these ambitions which was dissolved by Napoleon a year after the Battle of Austerlitz (1806). He substituted it by his conception of the United Europe under his own leadership as an emperor (since 1804). The Saint Alliance which came later after his fatal defeat conceived Europe, above all, as a continental area controlled by the three powers (Prussia, Russia, Austria). Nationalism and national revivals, the effort to unite German feudal and semifeudal states and to form a Slavonic unity, at least politically weakened and finally nearly suppressed the visions and conceptions of the federal European state. The First World War (1914-1918) represented not only the fight for the control over the world markets and for the restructuralisation of colonial domination but also for the control over Europe as such, when very often the famous statement of the Prussian and later German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) that „who is the master of Bohemia is the master of Europe“ has been quoted. The Central Europe has never found itself out of the game, has never disappeared from the viewfinder of big political players and strategists. Even after the victory of the Entente, the fall of Austro-Hungary and the signing of the the Versailles Treaty with enormous territorial losses and contributions for Germany, Austria and Hungary the visions of Pan-Europe have never disappeared (Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N.: Pan-Europa. Wien 1923), as weell as the reflections of the revival of the Danube monarchy or at least the Danube federation (Hodža, M.: Federácia v strednej Európe a iné štúdie. Bratislava 1997. Hodža, M.: Schicksal Donauraum. Erinnerungen. Mit einem Geleitwort von Dr. Otto von Habsburg. Wien – München – Berlin 1995). Lenin had his conception of Europe as the United States of Europe (his text „The Slogan The United States of Europe”, 1915) as a socialist federation of independent states, Hitler spoke of the „fortress Europe“ („Festung Europa“) as a barrier against the Eastern bolsheviks and Western plutocrats, the European Community of Coal and Steel led to the rise of the EEC (European Economic Community), later to the EC (European Community) and finally, to the EU on the basis of democratic states united, above all, by economic bonds; in this new stage the politicians often speak about the federation with a weakened sovereignty of its parts, i. e. about the political union. B. Central Europe: The Notion and the Range In the process of searching for the integrational kernels in connection with the formation of the idea of the unified Europe several attempts were realised which were more or less connected with older contexts, their revisions and restitutions. One of the kernels was the already mentioned notion of Central Europe. This notion and conception have their own diachrony. In the very beginning there was the idea of the continental Europe opposed to Great Britain (Napoleon’s continental blocade) with the kernel in Central Europe, later in this or similar way the Saint Alliance were formed with the centre in the Habsburg monarchy. The substantial boundary was represented by a book by a senator of Reichstag Friedrich Naumann Central Europe (Mitteleuropa. Berlin 1915) published in the same year as Lenin’ s article The Slogan The United States of Europe (in the Russian newspaper Social Democrat - Social-demokrat). The conception F. Naumann tried to explicate has been for many years regarded – and as a matter of fact correctly – as a Pan-Germanic effort to strengthen the German vanguard of Central Europe as a pure German space for further expansion in the framework of the axis Berlin – Bagdad with the exclusion of Slavonic population as unreliable and hostile. This idea was continued later in a much more radical way by German Nazis. Therefore Central Europe – in German „das Mitteleuropa“ – in democratic systems was prevalently understood as a tool of German imperialism and national socialism (Meyer, H. C.: Drang nach Osten. Fortunes of a Slogan-Concept in German-Slavic Relations, 1849-1990. Frankfurt am Main – New York - Paris – Wien 1996. Meyer, H. C.: Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815-1945. The Hague 1955) including the skepticism expressed by the Czech slavist Frank Wollman (Slovesnost Slovanů, 1928, 2^nd edition 2012). Nevertheless, even after the First World War the tendences towards the integration of Central Europe did not weaken (Miroslav Jeřábek: Za silnou střední Evropu: středoevropské hnutí mezi Budapeští, Vídní a Brnem v letech 1925-1939. Dokořán, Praha 2008, see the list of literature – the books by Elemer Hantos who was spiritus agens of this interwar movement the substantional part of which was being realised at Masaryk University, Brno). The last blow was dealt by Hitler’s takeover, by the Nazi putsch in Austria, later Austria’s Anschluss and the Second World War. After the Second World War Central Europe found itself in the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union and that is why – in the years of the cold war and iron curtain – some started to talk about the abduction or betrayal of Central Europe (Milan Kundera, Adam Michnik, Czeslaw Miłosz). The revival followed as a reaction on these reflections in the 1980s. Though the interview with René Wellek expresses rather a skeptical view (see below) of the possible restoration of the notion of Central Europe, it became evident that at that time and later after the fall of the Soviet bloc and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself a certain Central European federation has a chance to be realised and formed as an intermediate stage before entering the EU – later it appeared to be unfuntional and needless. There is just the Visegrád Four left which contains the Central European countries of the former Soviet bloc (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic) which was not followed by others (the question of Slovenia was discussed, Austria has never had such an intention). Central Europe as a geopolitical notion has nearly the same meaning as the whole of Europe: as a consequence of the complicated synchronous and diachronous relations which often permeate and rise from the past as manifestations of different state and national interest the formation of such a whole – as also the recent development in the EU demonstrates – is extremely difficult. The substantial part of Central Europe is formed by the basin of the Danube which is the subject of the famous book by Claudio Magris on the eve of the big ban towards the end of the 1980s. The Danube connected the Germans, Western Slavs, Hungarians, Southern Slavs, and touched the territory of Eastern Slavs, transgressed the geographical limits of Central Europe and connected it with the Balkans and the Mediterranean. At the same time, the substantial part of Central Europe did not tend towards the Danube, but to the Baltic and the Northern Sea territory, so the very heart of Europe from this point of view is split by the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands into two cultural areas (compare the Czech and Moravian folklore, especially folk songs) not mentioning the North of Moravia and Silesia (in contemporary Czech Republic and Poland). The division od cultural areas due to their sea and river basins has its sense: it is even discussed by the adherents of the so-called euroasianism. The transitive character of Central European area si well reflected in the hesitation of the Great Moravian sovereign Rostislav/Rastislav who finally selected for the christianization missison the European South, i. e. the river basin of the Danube. Central Europe is therefore stretched to several sides ethnically, culturally, geographically, religiously, at the same time, however it itself represents a specific cultural space, especially in relation to Eastern Slavs. The Byelorusian humanist scholar and man of letters Franciscus Skaryna (about 1490 – about 1551) was born in Polock/Polack and probably died right in Prague, studied in Cracow, Padua and Prague where he has been a botanist of the Roayl Garden since the 1530s and where he published his Byelorusian translation of the Bible, „the Russian Troika“ („Ruska trijcja“) (Shashkevych, Holovatsky, Vahylevych), a circle of Ukrainian Galicia writers and cultural activists worked in the territory of Austria and had its bases in Vienna and Buda where he published his writings, printed also in Prague in the Journal of the Czech museum. The substantial part of Ukrainian and Byelorusian literature was divided between Ukraina (Kyjiv, Kharkiv, Poltava), Russian (St.-Petersburg, Moscow) and Central European (Budapest, Vienna, Cracow, Prague) centres – the same is valid about Southern Slavs tending to Vienna and Prague. The question of Central Europe, or better to say the notion „Mitteleuropa“ itself, was discussed by the doyen of world literary scholarship, a native of Vienna and Prague René Wellek (1903-1995). In the first of the three interviews led by Peter Demetz on the pages of the annual Cross Currents he expressed his view rather skeptically in the sense that it is itself suspicious because it was invented by Friedrich Naumann during the year 1915. „Mitteleuropa“ was – at least according to Wellek – part of the German war propaganda of those days tending to the formation of the Central European monarchy which was bigger than Prussia. The conception itself is in his view vague enough because there are no clear limits of this notion which expresses rather a nostalgic mood. After he narrated his story about his father who as an Austrian official moved from Vienna to Prague to enthusiastically support the rise of the Czechoslovak Republic, anwers the same question once more. Peter Demetz rather provokingly returns to this when directly in Wellek’s life (Czech and German schools, Vienna, Prague, contrastive currents between the East and the West, North and the South) shows how mitteleuropäisch he is. Wellek admits he is a Central European with a clearly defined approach to Czech, German and English, but at the same time asserts that the old Mitteleuropa which existed in Austro-Hungary is not possible also as a consequence of the Soviet invasion starting since 1944 (the interview was realised just before the immense changes in this area towards the end of 1989). Both participants in their discussion express scepsis to the phenomenon of Central Europe. René Wellek asserts that between Ljubljana, Prague,Trieste, Budapest and Vienna there is little communication; at the same time he knows that all the places are connected by their attitude to the West. Between Slavonic literatures there are rare mutual relations: some similarities are there because they were influienced by the same Western literatures (see I. Pospíšil – M. Zelenka: René Wellek a meziválečné Československo. Ke kořenům strukturální estetiky/René Wellek and interwar Czechoslovakia. Towards the Roots of Structural Aesthetics. Masarykova univerzita, Brno 1996). The phenomenon of Central Europe is several times divided and then formed a complicated, torn net; it is neither a strictly homogeneous entity, nor an original whole: its is being formed gradually, by way of complicated permeations and cooexistence of different cultures. At the same time, it is the entity which is geographically and geopolitically diversed: its borders cannot be defined even approximately. Structurally and geographically the centre of Europe can be found in Ukraine, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, but Central Europe is usually understood as the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and some areas in its neighbourhood, though disputable (see further). Central Europe is not a merely mechanical set of compact states in contemporary frontiers: Central Europe is not the whole of Germany or Poland – which is given by the complicated historical development. The characterization of the Visegrád Four as a community of Central European states is therefore not precise. The representative evidence can be the Central European urbanism which is the firmest bond of this area in modern times: since the 19th century the visitor of the Central European city, e. g. to Prague ( (Praha, Prag), Cracow (Kraków, Krakau), Bratislava (Pressburg, Pozsony), Brno (Brünn), Budapest, Lemberg (Lwów, L’viv) and others has been arriving at the main station (Hauptbahnhof) where there were situated dominant means of transport (trams, troleybuses, buses, taxis), post-office and telegraph (now non-existing), hotel at the main station (Hotel am Bahnhof), main street leading to the main square; since the Middle Ages there has been a similar stratification of architectural styles since the rather rare Romanesque through the Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, rococo, neoclassicism/empire and pseudohistorical styles up to the decorative new art (Sezession, Jugendstil, Modern Style) and further to its negation in functionalist constructivism imported from the Russian and Soviet avantgarde. Sometimes the maximalist and minimalist conceptions of Central Europe are being discussed. The kernel seems to be the territory of the former Habsburg monarchy, i. e. dualist Austro-Hungary plus Bavaria and Saxony, the former Czech and Prussian/German Silesia – Low and Upper. In the maximalist view it could be understood in a diachronous way: northern Italy, Venice, Lombardy with Milan, Transylvania or perhaps the whole of Walachia, the whole Poland, Switzerland, probably also German Schwarzwald, former Prussia, Byelorusia and Ukraine or at least parts of their territories which used to belong to Austria. On the other hand, it is disputable if the Subcarpathian Ruthenia and Bukowina (parts of contemporary Ukraine) are Central Europe. The whole of Central Europe is an entity with variable and moveable geographical and cultural borders put together by natural cultural centres, such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Cracow, Lemberg/Lviv/Lwów, Ľvov, Dresden or Leipzig. The marginal, peripheral parts of the area were here and there dragged under the wings of other areas. The characteristic example is Italy which belonged to the area of Western Europe (Renaissance), later when its culture forming regions became part of Habsburg domain, or very close to it, slowly moved to Central Europe (Venice, Lombardy): the contradictions of the Italian North and the South is striking even nowadays and it is so strong that it could lead to the split of the whole country; similarly the split of Poland (the annexation by Russia, Prussia and Austria), Ukraine (Russia, Austria), even the trichotomy of the Czech Republic – due to historical lands of the Czech Crowns (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia) is visible even today though all the régimes after 1949 tried to erase all the differences by the radically new administrative division of the country into artificially formed regions (the Region Bohemian-Moravian Highlands/in Czech „Kraj Vysočina“ totally ignoring the former land borders). Historically and ethnically formed areas could be found also in contemporary Slovak Republic (West – East, North – South), but also in other parts of Europe. The typical stratification and the split of the phenomenon of Central Europe often brought different axiologizations from the point of view of its autonomous or subjected parts, mostly national literatures which reduced the literary centrisms – because of existential, fatal moments of their development to the question of the historical choice of cultural orientation. In the Czech environment the complex character of Central European centrisms due to historical-geographical determinants was simplified to the problems of Czech-German relations. The already mentioned René Wellek as early as the mid-1920s thought that the development of these areas was not linked with the decisive dichotomy of „big“ or „little“ literature or nation, but with the cultural level of the receiving environment, our attitudes, domestic live tradition capable of positive transformation of different stimuli of that time. The phenomenon of Central Europe manifests the sequential composition of cultural phenomena and their contradictory character. The phenomenon of Central Europe is defined as an opponent of West Europe or Germany and also as an opposition of the South and the East: at the same time it must contain all these elements. The phenomenon itself consists of what is negated, denied forming opposing centres. It is defined by the structural shift of emphasis to single elements of the whole entity: once it accentuates the Slavonic elements againts the strengthening Pangermanism, another time it stresses its Central European character, German character, Prague German and Jewish character against the strong impact of the Slavonic East demonstrating that it is Slavonic, but not general Slavonic, but rather West-Slavonic. This shift, permanent inner restructuring of this phenomenon of Central Europe is its disintegrational, weak spot. This lability which causes disintegration, is, at the same time, its stability: what is not stable and petrified, has no firm and firmly defined territorial, ethnic, ideological forms. What is vague and moveable, cannot be completely and totally destroyed. The single components of Central European centrism do not form alternative parallels: they react divergently, but are not able to suppress each other. Apart from the disintegration of Austro-Hungary, the Danube monarchy Claudio Magris impressively writes about, apart from the rise of successor states including Czechoslovakia, the phenomenon of Central Europe does not cease to hold the balance of power. It could not be possible to suppress completely the phenomenon of Austro-Hungary which was – though not successful, violent and deformed – an attempt at the constitution of the labile-stable, balanced state of Central European centrism. The classical example is a cultural and literary phenomenon of the biedermeier which as a literary current and stream was generally connected with the problems of transitory epochs and which – besides its South German background – was modified into alternative style tendency. C. Central Europe as a Geopolitical, Cultural and Spiritual Space The stability and the transformation of Central European phenomenon into one centre led to the unrest in the structure of Austro-Hungarian state; the boundary of the lability and the strikes from outside transgressed the acceptable balance of this entity. The phenomenon of Central Europe agrees rather with the vague, „sandy“ form that with the borders of the state though multinational and federal. It is also supported by the fact how Central European space contributes to the disputability of the notion „national literature“; history of literature reflects the prevalent existence of the sufficiently unified entities which represent autonomous literatures with all the attributes of independent literary phenomena – minority literatures written in minority languages which enter the net of interliterary relations. It is obvious that this situation corresponds to the so-called „small“, „historical“ nations which only rarely formed and independent national state with the homogeneous ethnic composition. The phenomenon of Central Europe – after all these peripeteias – appears to be rather spiritual than a purely geopolitical space, area, focus of the movement of various cultures and nations, in a sense an integrational kernel forming an important interstage in the process of overcoming various splits on the way towards the complicated position of contemporary Europe. Central Europe cannot be understood as something strictly defined and limited, but rather as a free, flexible cultural, mental or spiritual space – but also as an epicentre of ethnic, language and political plurality which – apart from the concentrated impacts both in the past and the present – preserves its specific features and the deep forces which continue to function. It is the space that attracts, but also integrates various influences: undoubtedly also contains emigration, for example, East-Slavonic, in a narrower sense Russian, in the interwar period, and today also heterogeneous migration. Central Europe belongs neither to Western Europe, nor to the East: therefore it is central. Its transitive location is caused by the simple fact that Germany as a whole at the beginning of modern times did not belong to Western Europe – Frank Wollman in his book The Literature of the Slavs (Slovesnost Slovanů) asserts that the border of the so-called Western Europe was situated on the axis Kiel – Trieste. The development of modern German literature shows it was just drawing near to the West (Sturm und Drang movement in the 18th century, especially Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller). Goethe’s term „Weltliteratur“ (world literature) was, after all, part of this strategy. More or less disputable is originally the German term „Ostmitteleuropa“ (East-Central Europe): it denotes the mixed area (languages, nations) except for Germany and Austria, as if a less developed part of Central Europe, i. e. Slavonic-Hungarian. The term „Westmitteleuropa“ (West-Central Europe) does exist, but it is being used only little, and its clear definition does not exist. This anomaly shows again the lability of the whole notion „Central Europe“ which some researchers even completely deny as artificial and too ideological. Central Europe is something given objectively which has its past and the present, but could also function as an ideological and political tool. A more generally accepted is the conception of Central Europe as a tool for overcoming the contradictions and animosities defined historically and the formation of bigger areas in which the sharpness of disagreements blunts or „defocuses“ (the problem Czech-German, Czech–Slovak, Czech-Austrian, Czech- Polish, Slovak-Hungarian). Not original, from other authors derived books and conference volumes are rarely useful apart from the fact that some researchers and editors follow the boom manipulated by mass media. D. Does the Phenomenon of Central Europe and Homo Europae centralis Exist? Though Central Europe as such is rather slippery, there must be also the phenomenon of Central European affiliation as homo balkanicus – homo Europae centralis. Who is he/she? 1) The man/woman freely moving among various languages, cultures and nations. 2) He/she is able to communicate in this mixed environment passively and actively on the basis of common mentality. 3) As for literature, it is ussually biliteral or multiliteral or there are translations as a mediator. 4) He/she is typical of common empathy, effort to cultural integration and supranational vision without giving up his/her mother tongue. 5) A certain cement of Central Europe is represented by the Jews: German-speaking were also Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, Ruthenian and Ukrainian Jews. In my book Central Europe and the Slavs (Střední Evropa a Slované, 2006) there are several chapters where the example of the Central European character and Central European man (Próza virtuální autenticity a existenciálního znejistění „Literatura blahodárného skřípotu a tření“: Žánr - poetika – styl v díle Jozefa Hnitky, Středoevropská dimenze a středoevropský osud v konfesionálním, románu-dokumentu Oty Filipa Sedmý životopis, Josef Suchý mezi idylou, elegií a kronikou), sometimes also some others[5]. We can also give some other examples of homines Europae centralis, e. g. Franz Mehring, Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, Ota Filip, František Kautman, Josef Suchý who usually moved between the Slavonic and Germanic elements, writing both Czech and German, connected with Prague, Brno or other specific Bohemian and Moravian regions. The same concerns the problem of Hungarian-Slovak biliterariness. Central Europe does not include only the cultural values created by the autochthonous nations of Central Europe, there are also many „invaders“, other nations penetrating into Central Europe bringing their own values. The following small case study could serve as an evidence. A Small Case Study Ljuba Vondroušková‘s Poetic Creation[6]: a Russian poetess in Central Europe The case study concerns the problem of a minority literature functioning in a majority literature environment. This general formulation has, however, several specific variants or alternatives. 1) The presence of a minority in a majority cultural and literary environment A. The specific variant is linked with the minority literature of a neighbouring country (e. g. Magyar/Hungarian literature in Slovakia or Rumania, Swedish literature in Finland, Polish literature in the Czech Republic, Ukrainian literature in Slovakia or Poland, Byelorusian literature in Poland or Ukraine). B. The minority literature occurs as a consequence of immigration/emigration processes caused by political or economic reasons (e.g. the so-called Russian Supportive Action in former Czechoslovakia in favour of East-Slavonic intellectual emigration in the 1920s-1930s). In this case the literature or literatures representing a minority tend to behave like isolated enclaves contacting the majority literature very rarely, mainly as a tool of the penetration of its works into a wider context – translations, criticism etc. C. “The Moving of Nations“ after the fall of communism towards the end of the 1980s. D. The immigration waves from the preceding periods after 1945 (because of the study at Czech/Czechoslovak universities, marriages with Czechoslovak citizens, e. g. the Vietnamese, Arabs, Africans, Russians, and Ukrainians). 2) Another problem is closely connected with co-existence and multiculturalism represented by the antinomies big/small national literatures, adaptability/isolationism/integration. There are two extreme phenomena: a) no contacts with the surrounding majority, but smaller literature; b) integration into the majority literature (the authors even start to write in the language of the majority population, e. g. Ovid, Brodsky, Nabokov etc.) The case of Lyubov Vondroušková (born 1946) is a special one. I met her in the middle of the 1990s in Brno. She wrote poetry when living in the USSR; then she met her future husband Ivan Vondroušek and came to former Czechoslovakia. She was a member of the Union of Soviet Journalists, her poems were published in some Soviet Russian periodicals. She settled in Mokrá-Horákov near Brno and began to work in the regional branch of the Czechoslovak Radio. After 1989 she tried several professions connected with small enterpreneurship and during her leisure time she devoted herself to writing poetry. Her first publication was called Megahertzes of the Heart (Мегагерцы сердца‚ 1993) and very soon was partly and then completely translated into Czech by her first Czech translator Vlasta Žáčková. Then there were quite a lot of Czech translators including the poet’s son, later Taťána Kuxová manifested her skill based on the fact that she became aware of the typological differences between the two poetic traditions – the Russian and the Czech one. Some Russians write their poetry in Russian not taking into account the surrounding cultural milieu; that is not this poetess’ case. Lyubov Vondroušková is quite sensitive to the Czech or, more precisely, Moravian culture and literature. On the one hand, Vondroušková wants to remain a Russian poet above all, on the other she wants to be integrated in the Czech cultural and political community and to be understood as its integral part. She undoubtedly wants to profit from her otherness, she is ready to have her cake and eat it. On the other hand, this approach of hers provokes some negative reactions at least from a part of Russian residents in the Czech Republic; they think she is not enough Russian, she makes mistakes in Russian, she uses Czech words or Czech word formation in her poems etc. The tendency to be integrated is connected with the helpful moves towards the Czech community and mentality; she, being a Russian, definitely felt the sharp differences between the Bohemian and Moravian mentality and understood its deep roots even in geological and natural conditions of both parts of the former Lands of the Bohemian Crown, especially encoded in the language of the South and East Moravian community. Lyubov Nikandrovna Vondroušková (née Galkina, first married Gorbacheva) came to former Czechoslovakia with his second husband Ivan Vondroušek. She lives in Mokrá-Horákov; in the Soviet Union she studied the Social School of the Ministry of Light Industry. In an interview with the author of the present study[7] she mentioned her reading Lermontov, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Esenin, and Blok. She admitted her pure versologic amateurism, her rather spontaneous, untrained approach to writing poetry. At that time she came to be interested in Czech literature (J. K. Tyl, J. Suchý, a Brno poet of Catholic orientation). A certain healthy naivity, probably partly genuine, partly pretended, was an accompanying element of her reflection upon poetry and her own role in it. In her first poems published in the Czech environment she repeated her Russian experience. Her poetry went back to the 19th-century Russian melic poetic tradition including the stylistic usage of Old Church Slavonic. From the time of her first collection of poems Megahertzes of Heart (Мегагерцы сердца, 1993) her attitude towards poetic creation could be characterized as a condensation of poetic creation, as the strengthening of its gnomic character. I have introduced Luybov Vondroušková into the Czech cultural environment since 1993 when I wrote the first Czech review of her first collection of poems. The main characteristic features of her position in the Czech milieu is her interest to penetrate into it, to become its specific part. Thus she started to look for a translator of her poetry into Czech. Her first translator was her friend Vlasta Žáčková who translated her first collection of poems (Megahertzes of Heart). In this early “Czech“ poetry in Russian Vondroušková cultivated the traditional subjects and poetics of classical Russian poetry: the connection of nature and love, human emotions, the Romantic feelings of loneliness, parting, amorous breakups; she very often dedicated her poems to her new Czech friends, e.g. to the Brno Orthodox priest, to her friends from Masaryk University etc. A typical example is the introductory poem called The Love Is Burning Out (Догорает любовь) with its typical Romantic amorous pessimism and desirable hope: Мы с тобой как чужие: Ни враги‚ ни друзья. В доме‚ как на чужбине‚ Приютиться нельзя. В доме‚ кам на пожаре‚ Догорает любовь. Не поможет‚ пожалуй‚ Ничего‚ ничего... Угольки тихо тлеют В отчужденных глазах... О былом не жалею: В сердце стихла гроза— Нашумевшая буря Неразгаданных чувств‚ Свои брови нахмурив‚ Горе бьет по плечу... Перебродит несчастье‚ Как дожди среди гроз... Я к тоске не причастна— Ты не жди моих слез. The theme of the majority of the poems from the early period of her poetic activity reflects her difficult life conditions in the new environment associated with nostalgia, sadness, memories of Russia, of her family, especially of her mother (Звезды для тебя, The Stars for You)‚ with the Russian Orthodox Church and its spirituality (Зов колоколов‚ The Challenge of the Bells). The dominant subject of Vondroušková‘ s poetry is nature and love, bitter reflections of life and death, hope and belief, more or less abstract categories typical of Romanticism in general and Russian Romanticism in particular, the traditional imagery of Russian classical feminine poetry. Unfortunately, the composition of her collections of poems is very often accidental, loose, the second or even the third editions differ a great deal from the composition of the original volumes. This also concerns the first Czech translations, more or less “selections of poems“ rather than regular collections. For example, the Czech translation of the collection of poems Megahertze srdce (in Czech, Brno 1996) contains a different sequence of poems, the translation is very free, approximate: Siréna zvonů volala mne k sobě Do kraje ikon posvátných. Bylo tam ticho jako v hrobě, Plameny svíček vrhaly svůj stín. S pokorou v duši kráčela jsem na zádech nesla hříchů kříž. It took several years before the poet found a new translator though the first one was not bad. The problem consisted in searching a flexible cultural position and to find an adequate Czech poetic tradition corresponding to the Russian one which was present in her own poetry. In some poems the first Czech translator Vlasta Žáčková intuitively found an impressive code even in the title poem Megahertze srdce: Ruce jak krabi Lezou po strunách. Na dně mojí duše Rozvířil se prach. Jen pomalu se hojí staré rány Z nitra kytary vytrácí se dech. Noty s písněmi se řadí Na svůj poslední maratónský běh. Sněhové vločky víří kolem ochromené duše. Ruce jako krabi vpily se do mého srdce. Hlas s bolestí se splétá A zaznívá jen tence. Jak sněhové vločky víří Milostné megahertze srdce. Russian original: Словно крабы рук Ползали по струнам‚ На глубинах мук Высыхали струны... Рокотала грусть‚ И внутри гитары Задыхался пульс‚ А в груди ---литавры... Марафонский бег: Ноты‚ песни‚ страсти... Как нежданный снег‚ Хлопьями---напасти... Я боюсь постичь Силу этой тайны... В душу---паралич! Жизнь последним таймом. Словно крабы рук Впились в мое сердце... Голос струн и мук Мечет мегагерцы. It would be interesting and effective to compare the composition, the segmentation of the poem and the complex stylization as welll as the phonic character of each version. The translator, probably only once or twice, has succeeded in finding a flexible and adequate position of the poet’s poetics corresponding to the vivid Czech poetic system. Sometimes it even seems that the Czech translation is paradoxically “better” or more impressive and effective than the Russian original forming an alternative poem, but not the genuine poetic translation. In the series of the following collections of poems Vondroušková entered the Czech cultural milieu by means of polished translations of a more experienced translator Taťána Kuxová. As for her originals, she published in quite a short time five collections of poems in the course of the 1990s: Устье грусти, В глуши души, Зов колоколов‚ Во власти страсти and Сказки из-за ласки. The eternal return home, to Russia is still the strongest motif of her poems, especially in the collections of poems Устье грусти (A Mouth of Sadness). The poet likes to play with words in the titles of her collections, very often with rhyme or/and alliteration (compare all the titles above). She still looks for her poetic ideal in Russian poetry (Pushkin, Lermontov, Esenin) trying to synthetize her new place of residence with Russia. In her collection of poems called Зов колоколов (The Challenge/Call of the Bells) she draws nearer the Czech-Moravian countryside though her thematic orientation is not very original: Морава Упало солнце щедрмы градом К ногам Моравы виноградом‚ Я в грунт ее судьбы‚ как сваю‚ Себя сегодня забиваю. И ничего не забываюю! Ни Волги‚ ни Петрова Вала‚ Где суховей весной полощет Целинную тюльпанов площадь... А в Чехии – такие рощи – Зеленые святые мощи! Мне в колбе сердца‚ претекая‚ Бурлится красное вино. Я перед Богом тихо каюсь. Мне счастье было суждено: Любовь к Мораве и России – Слитая жизненная сила. Та узреет вместе с южным градом В раю Моравы виноградом. Я в грунт ее судьбы‚ как сваю‚ Себя вчистую забиваю! This poem could be regarded as programmatic: the love of both Moravia and Russia, the poet never forgets Russia while she takes delight in Moravian countryside with vineyards and red wine, she still evokes the Volga, the steppe and its typical dry wind, as she puts it “the love of Moravia and Russia – this is a united strength of life”. In the collection of poems В глуши души (In the Desert of the Soul) she is even more gnomic, condensed and also enigmatic‚ her poems here are more or less poetic miniatures: Я душу разделю‚ как хлеб‚ Чтоб каждому достался ломтик. Подам блуждающим во мгле По лучику от солнца. Так палит у меня в груди‚ Готов взорваться сердца стронций. В глуши души‚ мой Господин – Мой Бог‚ открой оконце... One of the poetic culminations of this series of volumes is represented by the collection of love poems called Во власти страсти (In the Power of Passion). Love is understood in its widest sense. Therefore besides the pure love poems like Где ты был… (Where have you been…) there are also such poems as Ветеранам (To the Veterans of War)‚ Притча (A Parable)‚ Эпитафия (An Epitaph)‚ Бред (The Ravings)‚ Самокритика (Self-Criticism)‚ Мысли (Thoughts) and probably the best of them У церкви (At the Church): У старой церкви здание росло‚ Бетонными плечами прямо к небу Небрежно придавив святую небыль‚ Вселенную без радости несло. На куполах угасло серебро‚ В клиросе остались только ветры‚ Так умирала вековая вера... И крест торчал изломанным ребром... In the summer semester 2005 I organized a special seminar for the students of Russian for translation of Russian poetry into Czech. We also dealt with the poems by Lyubov Vondroušková. Several more successful attempts were published (Eva Malenová, Kateřina Lipková, Vlastimil Staněk). This seminar opened the problem of a new Czech translator of Vondroušková‘s poetry into Czech again. Her poems become more official, she participated in the Czech poetic competition Ars Poetica (Puškinův památník, Pushkin‘s Memorial), became a member of the Society of Czech Writers (see above). Together with her new Czech translator Taťána Kuxová she published three volumes of her poetry both in the Russian original and in the Czech translation – The Mirror Reflection (Zrcadlení/Зеркальное отражение) 1-3. The first volume was accompanied by my foreword and in the end by a short interview with the translator Taťána Kuxová.[8] Just the fleeting glance at the Russian and Czech versions demonstrates the translator’s creativeness, her ability of semantic and poetological compensation, but, on the other hand, her too free approch towards poetic Russian; her predecessor Vlasta Žáčková was less skillful, but often nearer to the core of Vondroušková‘s poetics though not always acceptable for modern Czech readers. Kuxová gradually finds an adequate poetic code – instead of the Russian metalic character of verse she uses the Czech expressive poetics, e. g. in the poem Почтoвый ящик (A Pillar Box): „Почтовый ящик ограничил мир/ Прищуром узкой прорези в железе./ И пустoта в глаза на целый миг‚/ Как остриë отравленное лезет./ Я никогда тебе не напишу‚/ Что одиночество до смерти ненавижу./ Но пару строк в конверт вложить спешу‚ / Чтоб на мгновенье быть к тебе поближе. //// Výřez ve schránce zbytek světa ťal, /nechal jen škvíru, která chladem zívá,/ jako meč, když svůj ortel vykonal/ a prázdno v očích dlouhou chvíli zbývá.// Nedodám nic ze všech slov přes míru,/ samotu nést, že není v lidských silách,/ svěřím jenom schránce kus papíru,/ abych na chvíli v tvé blízkosti byla.“ Thus the peaceful battle for an adequate poetic expression of her poetry into Czech goes on.[9] Vondroušková made acquaintance with a Brno graphic artist Olga Plchová whose illustrations and graphic objects often accompany new editions of her poetry. Later Vondroušková discovered another realm of her poetic activity: she started translating from Czech into Russian. Besides the poems of the Czech poet Jindra Lírová[10] she has translated a volume of Jan Skácel’s poetry under the title The Deaf Season (Немой сезон)[11]. Even here the poet and translator is more successful in smaller poems like this one: Ten den je tvůj a z malinkého zlata jak na malíčku snubní prstýnek a na zahradě trpce voní máta osiky ztichly u smířených řek Этот день только твой – Из крохи позолоты На мизинце блестит Обручально роса. Сад заманчиво льстит Терпким запахом мяты‚ И речная коса Усмирила бой волн. (There are the translations of the poems from the volume A znovu láska). Another activity of Lyubov Vondroušková is linked with the translations of her poetry into Esperanto.[12] Слова – основа отношений: Холодных‚ теплых‚ никаких... Речей блуждающих крушенье В широтах неморских... La vortoj – varpo de rilatoj Varmaj, fridaj, iom svagaj… De tiaj vortoj rezultato Nur paroloj erarvagaj… (translated by Jaroslav Krolupper) Some of Vondroušková‘s poems were translated into Czech by a famous Czech translator from Russian Zdenka Bergrová (1923-2008), and her husband, a painter and a graphic artist Věroslav Bergr, illustrated some of the later volumes. Lyubov Vondroušková represents among other Russian writers living and working in the Czech Republic a specific case. She writes in Russian, but also translates from Czech, her poems have been translated into Czech and Esperanto. She participates in the Czech cultural life, became a chairman of the Cultural Society of the Russians in Moravia, member of the Society of Czech Writers, she is really integrated into Czech life without losing her Russian roots. She programmatically tends to integrate Czech and Russian traditions even in poetic diction. There is, however, a certain danger: her social activity might lessen her poetic creation, to influence in a negative way both its quantity and quality. She started her “Czech” poetic career as a Russian poet and translator with poetic miniatures and minor poems denying a longer form of a poetic narrative (in Russian “поэма”). She exploited traditional Russian poetics, the poetic layers of Old Church Slavonic as a natural part of the Russian poetic language; at the same time, she tended towards the synthesis of the Czech and Russian cultural and poetic traditions; she wanted to remain a Russian, a part of the Russian culture and poetry, but, simultaneously, she tried to become part of the culture and poetry of the country she lives in and wants to live on. The depth and width of this cultural integration of one of the minor representatives of a large literature and poetry into a majority, but smaller literature and poetry is vague and indefinite yet, but on the level of social contacts it has reached quite a good quality and results. Lyubov Vondroušková with her poetry influenced at least part of Czech cultural and literary life of the period 1995-2010 and even penetrated beyond its boundaries back to Russia and through Esperanto into the world; the fact which confirms her romantic and utopian tendencies which belong to literature in general and to poetry in particular, mainly in Slavonic countries. Lyubov Vondroušková is an interesting, almost model type of a representative of a big world literature appearing in the context of a smaller majority literature who tends to be integrated in the new environment as a poet, cultural activist, and translator from a smaller majority poetry, who at the same time initiates the translations of her own poetry into Czech and another langure, which would enable her to make her name in the world. These activities have a complementary character with regard to the dominant goal, i. e. the support of her own poetry in foreign environment. The poet does not suffer from the characteristic feature of representatives of big nations who usually ignore the smaller majority literature of their context and form a certain enclave of culture and influence inside a foreign country: she does not lose her Russian character, but, at the same time, tries to connect it with the traditions of Czech poetry and culture. Selected Literature Primary: The Poetic Works by Lyubov Vondroušková Мегагерцы сердца. Brno 1993. Устье грусти. Brno 1996. Зов колоколов. Brno 1997. Во власти страсти. Mokrá 1998.- Сказки из-за ласки. Mokrá 1999. В глуши души. Brno 2001. Megahertze srdce. Brno 1996. Translated by Vlasta Žáčková a Alexandr Gorbačov. S láskou. Mokrá 2003. Zrcadlení. Зеркальное отражение. Translated by Taťána Kuxová. Brno 2003. Zrcadlení 2. Зеркальное отражение. Translated by Taťána Kuxová. Brno 2004. Zrcadlení 3. Зеркальное отражение. Translated by Taťána Kuxová. Brno 2005. Secondary: Franta, V.: “Ljubov” – tvůrčí nespoutanost a svobodné cítění. In: Rusové a Morava/Русские и Моравия. Sborník referátů a sdělení z konference 13. ledna 2007. Ruské kulturně osvětové sdružení na Moravě, o.s., Brno 2007, pp. 61-70. Pospíšil, I.: Ljubov Vondroušková: Bez názvu, Bezvýchodnost, Megahertze srdce (přel. Vlasta Žáčková). Úvod k publikaci. Alternativa Nova, 1997, 7, March, p. 349. Pospíšil, I.: Na tváři lehký smích. Doslov ke sbírce Ljubov Vondrouškové Skazki iz-za laski, Brno 1999. Sine. Pospíšil, I.: Neřeďte lásku...In: Ljubov Vondroušková: Zrcadlení – Zerkal‘noje otraženije (Translated by Taťána Kuxová, illustrations: Olga Plchová a Stanislava Losová). Onufrius, Brno 2003, pp. 4-5. Pospíšil, I.: Rozhovor s překladatelkou Taťánou Kuxovou. Místo slovníkového hesla. In: Ljubov Vondroušková: Zrcadlení – Zerkal‘noje otraženije (Translated by Taťána Kuxová, illustrations: Olga Plchová a Stanislava Losová), pp. 64-69, 2004. Pospíšil, I.: Ruská báseň v moravské krajině. In: Ljubov Vondroušková: Megahertze srdce. Brno 1996. Pospíšil, I.: Ruské nebe na moravské zemi. In: Любовь Вондроушкова: Zrcadlení /Зеркальное отражение 2, Brno 2004, Translated by Taťána Kuxová, pp. 4-9. Pospíšil, I.: Ruský hlas v Brně. Rovnost 19. 7. 1994, p. 7. A Small Remark on the Margin: Vietnamese Imigration in Central Europe Another example of the Central European „invaders“ is the case of Vietnamese imigration and its cultural creations described in the doctoral dissertation by Veronika Daová Kultúrna integrácia Vietnamcov v stredoeurópskom kontexte (The Cultural Integration of the Vietnamese in Central European Context). The dissertation was successfully defended under my tutorship in 2013, but was not published yet. The main goal of this dissertation was to examine the cultural integration of the Vietnamese immigrants in Central-European context (specifically in Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic), putting emphasis on the second generation, the so called „Banana kids”. Firstly, the authoress tried to provide a complex overview of the history and present situation of Vietnamese migrants in Central-European countires. Secondly, she focused on the acculturation, biculturalism, bilinguism and the question of (double) identity of second generation Vietnamese migrants. Last but not least she emphasised the importance of strenghtening the Vietnamese-Central-European literary relationship, including the significance of literary translation in terms of the successful integration of Vietnamese migrants in Central-Europe.[13] E. The Prospects of Central Europe The chance of central Europe - though its importance was not so big as in the past and, more or less, also in the 1980s -1990s – in the future may be linked with the general crisis of the West-East division of the world and the increasing importance of the third world powers, such as China, India, Brasil etc. Central Europe might again become the centre, the cultural focus of the permeation of various nations, cultures, and languages. The so-called betrayal of Central Europe proclaimed by some Central-European intellectuals living mostly in exile (Milan Kundera) followed by its revival in the 1980s-1990s belongs to the complicated histories of the notion and its range and also with its so-called rear: Ukraine, Byelorusia, Northern Italy (Alto Adige/Upper Adige, Südtirol/South Tyrol), Transylvania (in Romanian Transilvania/Ardeal)/Hung.Erdély, Siebenbürgen,Bukovina/Bukowina/Bukovyna/Buchenland/, Switzerland, as mentioned above. An interesting treatise connecting the fate of this area may be represented by the brand new book, though written mostly in the 1970s in the years of the Czechoslovak „normalisation period“ after the Soviet invasion in 1968, by František Kautman For the Czech National Identity.[14] Its is as sort of an original „textbook“ of the Czech aspect of the Central European geopolitical, and geocultural space, a kind of the history of the Czech political thought in the 19th-20th centuries with profound interpretations everybody cannot agree with completely, but a deep „philosophy“ of the historical and political behaviour of the Czech society and its representatives in the riverbed of Austro-Hungarian monarchy and later its new independent states-successors on the eve of a new world crisis followed by the Munich Agreement and the Second World War. The substance and range of Central Europe is also flexible, moving as it was stated above on the case of Italy, Transylvania or Croatia. But its kernel traditionally consists of the monarchy plus Bavaria and Saxony in the German geopolitical space. Another question is connected with the problem whether Central Europe consists of the whole state or parts of it, former autonomous territories or regions (Galicia, Transylvania etc., now parts of other countries, i. e. Poland, Ukraine, Romania). Traditionally we prefer the diachronous view not accepting the modern state of these territories, usually in connection with the Visegrád Four the whole countries are taken into consideration (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic). The Czech lands were lucky as they often stood at the cradle of the formation of other Slavonic literatures which belonged to the problem of Central Europe’s rear. The Byelorusian Franciscus Skaryna (most probably 1490 – 1551) translated and started to publish a new translation of the Bible in a spoken language of his birthplace Polatsk (Russian Polotsk) under the title Bivlija ruska in Prague which is traditionally regarded as the beginnings of modern Byelorusian. Skaryna was baptised twice: at first as Franciscus (Francišak) in the monastery of Societatis Iesu near Minsk/Mensk, the second Orthodox Heorhij (Georgij, George). The first text („duma“) in Ukrainian appeared in Jan Blahoslav’s Czech Grammar (Ivančice, 1571). Another cardinal question concerns the consequences of the integration and the split in Europe and Central Europe in the years 1989-2015. Where is the West and where is the East? And another split: North-South: the problem of Greece, Portugal, and Spain in the EU, a more global problem in the world: Asian giants, Asian Bank, Euroasia under Russia etc. Thus, the problem of Central Europe does not stand isolated, it is a mere part of global world problems. The main geopolitical significance of the concept of Central Europe itself consists in the overcoming of the former deep contradictions between European countries stressing the common interest and the past cooperation given, for example, by the existence of the natural sources functioning as arteries of trade and international political relations (see Claudio Magris: Danube/Danubio, 1986; Claudio Magris, born 1939, is the author of the book on the Habsburg dynasty Il mito absburgico nella letteratura austrica moderna, Torino 1963).[15] The prevailing view of Central Europe now is the spiritual more than geopolitical or geocultural space. Central Europe is regarded as a spiritual refuge for politically persecuted, for the Eastern Europe’s position of varias bias. This opinion was also expressed in the famous discussion which Peter Demetz led with René Wellek on the pages of the former prof. Matejka’s journal Cross Currents (see appendix) which I translated on the basis of their consent for the book prepared by Miloš Zelenka which I became a co-author.[16] The central subject, i. e. Mitteleuropa, mitteleuropäisch, was discussed in which René Wellek towards the end of the 1980s (published 1990) expressed his rather sceptical view of the possibility to restore or renew the old Central European concept. He did not know, how significant the fall of the Soviet régime was; on the other hand, the history went on so rapidly that even the concept of Central Europe as a mediating stage on the way to the European Union appeared to be too late, useless, and non-functional. From this point of view all the discussion where the real geographical centre of Central Europe is located (Ukraine, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Austria) are meaningless as the Central Europe is a term denoting the cultural, mental or spiritual Europe‘s focus. Surprisingly enough, even nowaday, at the time when the Austro-Hungarian monarchy does not exist any more and the Central Europe is more or less just a cultural term not having the ambition to become a real geopolitical term, there are too many common features, e. g. in urbanism, connecting the lands and countries being known as Central European: The basic problem is presented by the initial primary question whether Central Europe is geopolitical, cultural, or spiritual space? We answered it agreeing with the cultural and spiritual significance of this area than the direct geopolitical aims. Another one about the consistency and inconsistency of Central Europe might be answered in a little ironic way that the more inconsistent Central Europe is, the more consistent is becoming, the more stable its spiritual and cultural meanings are. One of the most important cement for making Central Europe a compact entity if „homo Europae centralis“ we have already discussed above: the man freely moving between various languages, cultures, and nation, able to communicate in this environment on the basis of similar mentality, typical of common empathy, tendency towards cultural integration and supranational visions without abandoning his mother tongue (a specific cultural cement of Central Europe was represented by the Jews and their languages – old and newer Hebrew and yiddish (see again our book Střední Evropa a Slované, Brno, 2006, Central Europe and the Slavs). III. Basic Information about the Course Central Europe: Substance and Conceptions Type, extent and method of learning activities: 1 lesson of lecture per week Form of study: daily, external Recommended course-load (hours): 1 lesson Per week: 1 Per study period: 1 semester Method of study: Number of credits: 5 Recommended semester/trimester of study: Study level: MA Prerequisites: none Conditions for completion the course: attendance 80%, seminar essay in 10 pages Learning outcomes: The student will be able to formulate the conceptions of Central Europe, its range and intrinsic development both diachronically and synchronically. He/she will have the grasp of the languages and literatures of Central Europe, its culture, the basic knowledge of its political and economic aspects and be able to analyse the elementary problems of the subjects in written in the form of a seminar work, essay etc. Brief outline of the course: 1. The notion of Central Europe in history 2. The conceptions of Central Europe 3. Central Europe as part of area studies 4. The ethnological, linguistic, and literary substance of Central Europe 5. Central Europe as a political and ideological conception 6. Central European cultures 7. Does „homo Europae centralis“ exist? 8. Inner relations of Central European countries 9. The geographical and geopolitical development of Central Europe 10. Central Europe as geopolitical, cultural and spiritual space 11. The political system of Central European countries in the past and in the present, Central Europe and the EU 12. Central Europe and its future prospects Recommended literature: Areál – sociální vědy – filologie. Ed. Ivo Pospíšil. Kabinet integrované žánrové typologie, Ústav slavistiky, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Brno 2002. Areálová slavistika a dnešní svět. Monografie z filologicko-areálových studií. Ed.: Ivo Pospíšil. Česká asociace slavistů. Tribun EU, Brno 2010, s. 3-5. ISBN 978-80-7399-987-2. Bister, F. (hrsg.): Kulturelle Wechselseitigkeit in Mitteleuropa. Ljubljana 1995. Brněnská hungaroslavistika a česko-slovensko-maďarské vztahy. Eds: Ištván Käfer, Ivo Pospíšil, red. Erika Sztakovicsová. Vydanie podporil IVF 21110172 Academic discussion on history, culture and religion of Visegrád nations: new directions. Gerhardus Kiadó. Vydané v spolupráci s Kabinetom hungaroslavistiky Ústavu slavistiky FF MU (Brno) a Českou asociáciou slavistov, Visegrád Fund, Segedín 2012. Burmeister, H.-P.: Boldt, F.: - Mészáros, G.: (Hrsg.): Mitteleuropa: Traum oder Trauma? Bremen 1988. Busek, E. – Bix, E.: Projekt Mitteleuropa. Wien 1986. Busek, E. – Wilflinger: Aufbruch nach Mitteleuropa: Rekonstruktion eines versunkenen Kontinents. Wien 1986. Busek, E.: Mitteleuropa: Eine Spurensicherung. Wien 1997. Central Europe. Core or Periphery? Copenhagen Business School Press, København 2000. Centrisme interlittéraire des littératures de l’Europe Centrale. Literární studie. Práce Slovanského ústavu AV ČR, 5, Masarykova univerzita, Brno 1999. Redacteurs: Ivo Pospíšil, Miloš Zelenka. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N. : Krise der Weltanchauung. Wien 1923. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N. : Weltmacht Europa. Stuttgart 1971. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N.: Kommen die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa? Glarus 1938. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N.: Pan-Europa. Wien 1923. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N.: Totaler Staat – totaler Mensch. Wien 1937. Gauss, K.-M.: Die Vernichtung Mitteleuropas. Klagenfurt – Salzburg 1991. Gerlich, P./Glass, K. (hrsg.): Vergangenheit und Gegenwart Mitteleuropas. Wien – Poznań 1998. Gerlich, P./Glass, K./, Kiss Endre (hrsg.): Von der Mitte nach Europa und zurück. Wien – Poznań 1997. Gerlich, P./Glass, K./Serloth, B. [Hg.]: Mitteleuropäische Mythen und Wirklichkeiten. Wien - Toruń 1996. Gerlich, P./Glass, K./Serloth, B. [Hg.]: Neuland Mitteleuropa. Ideologiedefizite und Identitätskrisen. Wien-Toruń 1995. Gimpl, G. (hrsg.): Mitteleuropa. Mitten in Europa. Helsinki 1996. Glass, K./ Puślecki, Z. W. (Hg.): Mitteleuropäische Orientierung der 90er Jahre. Wien – Poznań 1999. Goworowska-Puchala, I.: Mitteleuropa. Rdzeń Starego Kontynentu. Toruń 1997. Gürge, W.: Paneuropa und Mitteleuropa. Berlin 1929. Hantos, E.: Das Donauproblem. Wien 1928. Hantos, E.: Das Geldproblem in Mitteleuropa. Jena 1925. Hantos, E.: Das mitteleuropäische Agrarproblem und seine Lösung. Berlin 1931. Hantos, E.: Die Handelspolitik in Mitteleuropa. Jena 1925. Hantos, E.: Die Kulturpolitik in Mitteleuropa, Stuttgart 1926. Hantos, E.: L’Europe centrale. Une nouvelle organisation économique. Pars 1932. Hantos, E.: Mitteleuropäische Eisenbahnpolitik. Zusammenschluß der Eisenbahnsysteme von Deutschland, Österreich, Ungarn, Tschechoslowakei, Polen, Rumänien und Jugoslawien. Wien 1929. Hantos, E.: Mitteleuropäische Kartelle im Dienste des industriellen Zusammenschlusses. Berlin 1931. Hantos, E.: Mitteleuropäische Wasserstraßenpolitik. Berlin 1932. Hodža, M.: Federácia v strednej Európe a iné štúdie. Bratislava 1997. Hodža, M.: Schicksal Donauraum. Erinnerungen. Mit einem Geleitwort von Dr. Otto von Habsburg. Wien – München – Berlin 1995. Jahn, E.: Bibliographie zur Mitteleuropa Diskussion. Beilage. Zeitschrift für Politik und Kultur im Mittel- und Osteuropa, Nr. 21, November 1988. Johnson, L. R.: Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. New York – Oxford 1996. Katzenstein, P. J. (ed.): Mitteleuropa. Between Europe and Germany. Providence – Oxford 1997. Kautman, F.: F. M. Dostojevskij - věčný problém člověka. Praha 1992. Kautman, F.: F. X. Šalda a F. M. Dostojevskij. Praha 1968. Kautman, F.: K typologii literární kritiky a literární vědy. Praha 1996. Kautman, F.: Literatura a filosofie. Praha 1968. Krebs, H.: Paneuropa oder Mitteleuropa. Münschen 1931. Kujawa, A.: Mitteleuropa als Paradigma der Identitätssuche? Der Prosawerk von Czesław Miłosz im Kontext der Mitteleuropa-Debatte de achtziger Jahre. Wien 1997. Le Rider, J.: L’Europe Centrale – L’Idee germanique de Mitteleuropa. Paris 1994. Lemberg, H. (hrsg.): Ostmitteleuropa zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (1918-1939). Stärke und Schwäche der neuen Staaten, nationale Minderheiten. Marburg 1997. Lewis, P.: Central Europe since 1945. London and New York 1994. Magris, C.: Dunaj. Praha 1992. Meyer, H. C.: Drang nach Osten. Fortunes of a Slogan-Concept in German-Slavic Relations, 1849-1990. Frankfurt am Main – New York - Paris – Wien 1996. Meyer, H. C.: Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815-1945. The Hague 1955. Pospíšil, I. - Zelenka, M.: Meziliterární společenství - meziliterárnost - meziliterární centrismy - světová literatura (Ke koncepci Ďurišinova týmu). Spoluautor Miloš Zelenka. Opera Slavica, VII, 1997, 1, 13-21. Pospíšil, I. – Zelenka, M.: Mitteleuropa als Knotenpunkt der Methodologien. Frank Wollmans Slovesnost Slovanů – Traditionen und Zusammenhänge. In: Frank Wollman: Die Literatur der Slawen. Herausgegeben von Reinhard Ibler und Ivo Pospíšil. Aus dem Tschechischen übertragen von Kristina Kallert. Vergleichende Studien zu den slavischen Sprachen und Literaturen. Herausgegeben von Renate Belentschikow und Reinhard Ibler, Bd. 7. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main – Berlin – Bern – Bruxelles – New York – Oxford – Wien 2003. Aus dem Tschechischen übersetzt von Reinhard Ibler. Pospíšil, I. - Zelenka, M.: René Wellek a meziválečné Československo. Ke kořenům strukturální estetiky. Brno 1996. Pospíšil, I. – Zelenka, M.: René Wellek and Interwar Czechoslovakia: the Roots of Structural Aesthetics. BUNMEI (Civilisation) Tokyo, 17, 1998, 79-89. Pospíšil, I. - Zelenka, M.: Zur Kategorie des Raums in der Literaturwisseschaft. Marginalien zu einem Phänomen der mitteleuropäischen Literaturen. Germanoslavica IV (IX), 1997, 1, 179-189. Pospíšil, I. (ed.): Areál – sociální vědy – filologie. Kabinet integrované žánrové typologie, Ústav slavistiky, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Brno 2002. Pospíšil, I. (ed.): Integrovaná žánrová typologie (Komparativní genologie). Projekt – metodologie – terminologie – struktura oboru – studie. Hlavní autoři: Ivo Pospíšil – Jiří Gazda - Jan Holzer. Brno 1999. Pospíšil, I.: El centrismo interliterario mediterráneo y la literatura russa. In: Literatura europea comparada. Compilación de textos César Domínguez. Arco/Libros, Madrid 2013, s. 313-322. ISBN 978-84-7635-860-3. Pospíšil, I.: Il centrismo interletterario mediterraneo e la letteratura russa. In: Il Mediterraneo. Una rete interletteraria. La Méditerranée. Un réseau interlittéraire. Stredomorie - medziliterárna sieť. A cura di Dionýz Ďurišin e Armando Gnisci. Università degli studi di Roma „La Sapienza“, Studi (e testi) italiani. Collana del Dipartimento di italianistica e spettacolo, Roma 2000, 101-109. Pospíšil, I.: Literární věda a teritoriální studia. Nitra 2014. Pospíšil, I.: Mitteleuropa und Tschechoslowakei: Suche nach einem literaturwissenschaftlichen Kompromiss. In: Litteraria Humanitas XI. Crossroads of Cultures: Central Europe, Kreuzwege der Kulturen: Mitteleuropa, Křižovatky kultury: Střední Evropa, Perekrestki kul’tury: Srednjaja Jevropa. Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Ústav slavistiky, Brno 2002, editor: Ivo Pospíšil, s. 143-158. Pospíšil, I.: Mitteleuropäische Dimension und mitteleuropäisches Schicksal in Ota Filips konfessionelem Roman-Dokument Sedmý životopis. In: Litteraria Humanitas XI. Crossroads of Cultures: Central Europe, Kreuzwege der Kulturen: Mitteleuropa, Křižovatky kultury: Střední Evropa, Perekrestki kul’tury: Srednjaja Jevropa. Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Ústav slavistiky, Brno 2002, editor: Ivo Pospíšil, s. 305-316. Pospíšil, I.: Slavistika na křižovatce. Brno 2003. Pospíšil, I.: Srednjaja Jevropa kak duchovnoje prostranstvo i rol’ literaturovedenija. In: Litteraria Humanitas XI. Crossroads of Cultures: Central Europe, Kreuzwege der Kulturen: Mitteleuropa, Křižovatky kultury: Střední Evropa, Perekrestki kul’tury: Srednjaja Jevropa. Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Ústav slavistiky, Brno 2002, editor: Ivo Pospíšil, s. 7-17. Pospíšil, I.: Srednjaja Jevropa kak perekrestok literaturovedčeskoj metodologii. In: Vzaimodejstvije literatur v mirovom literaturnom processe (Problemy teoretičeskoj i istoričeskoj poetiki). Materialy meždunarodnoj naučnoj konferencii, Čast’ 1, Grodnenskij gosudarstvennyj universitet imeni Janki Kupaly, Grodno 1997, 3-10. Pospíšil, I.: Střední Evropa a Slované. Masarykova univerzita, Brno 2006. Pospíšil, I.: Vizualizace v komplexu uměleckých detailů v románu Oty Filipa Sedmý životopis. In: Dwudziestowieczna ikonosfera w literaturach europejskich. Wizualizacja w literaturze. Pod redakcją Bożeny Tokarz, Katowice 2002, s. 299-307. Pospíšil, I.: Východoslovanské meziliterární centrismy na pozadí balkánských centrismů. Zbornik Matice srpske za slavistiku, Beograd 1994, t. 46-47, 19-27. Rumpler, H.: Eine Chance für Mitteleuropa. Wien 1997. The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe (ed. by Karin Maag). Hants 1997. Weidenfeld, W. (hrsg.): Mittel- und Osteuropa auf dem Weg in die Europäische Union. Gütersloh 1995. Wollman, F.: Slovesnost Slovanů. Eds. I. Pospíšil, M. Zelenka. Brno 2012. Zentraleuropa, Mitteleuropa. Gemeinsamkeiten und Trennlinien. Wien 1991. Zelenka, M.: Zelenka, M.: Comparative Literature and Area Studies. Jihočeská univerzita, Pedagogická fakulta, Katedra českého jazyka a literatury, České Budějovice 2012. Zelenka, M. (ed.): Střední Evropa v souvislostech literární a symbolické geografie. Nitra 2008. Zelenka, M.: K typologii literární kritiky a literární vědy. Slavia, 66, 1997, s. 494-495. Zelenka, M.: Komparatistika v kulturních souvislostech. Jihočeská univerzita, Pedagogická fakulta, Katedra českého jazyka a literatury, České Budějovice 2012. Zelenka, M.: Literární věda a slavistika. Academia, Praha 2002. Language knowledge required for passing the course: English Teacher: Ivo Pospíšil Guarantor of the programme: Ivo Pospíšil Annotation The present course is intended for the students od area studies who are interested in the cultural space of Central Europe as a source of information for a deeper knowledge of the countries in this area. The course focuses on both the diachronic and synchronic dimension of Central Europe. At the very beginning there is an attempt at the definition of the phenomenon which stands between the geopolitical understanding and the cultural and spiritual concepts in which Central Europe is conceived as a virtual entity with the specific past and present, multunational and multicultural space based on conflicts and contrasts on the one hand and on many common features on the other. The key to the proper grasp of this cultural territory is represented by languages and literatures, e. g. Slavonic (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Sorbian Upper and Lower, possibly Croatian) and German in its varieties in Germany (Saxony, Bavaria) and Austria as well as Hungarian. The substantial part of the course is devoted to the study of Central European literatures including the question if such cluster of literatures really form a natural unity. The important part of the course is thus represented by comparative and genre studies. The cultural space would not be complete without the study of other kinds of art, such as music, visual arts, i. e. painting, sculpture, architecture etc., which have been determining the cultural space of Central Europe since the beginning of the 20th century. The typical styles are New Art (Modern Style) and later constructivism which dominated in Central European cities of the former Habsburg monachy/ Astro-Hungarian Empire in the architectural plan itself (main railway station with post-office, telegraph, telephone and „Hotel am Bahnhof“, main street, main square, residential houses built in new art style (l‘art nouveau). The greatest problem is connected with the concept of Central Europe as part of area studies. The study of the Central European population is linked with ethnological problems and the political system of Central European countries of both the past and the present. Central Europe is also conceived as an ideological and political tool. The lecturer also asks the question if the so-called „homo Europae centralis“ exists and links his explication with the inner relations of Central European countries as well as with the geographical and geopolitical development of Central Europe. The great attention is paid to the relations of Central Europe and the EU and to Central Europe‘s future prospects. IV. Central Europe – Terminology Selection „Festung Europa“ Acmeism Archirecture Artistic styles and currents Austria Austrian Lands Avantgarde/avant-garde Baroque Bavaria Bohemia Bukowina Bulgarian Byelorusian Carinthia/Kärnten Central Europe Central Europe and area studies Central European composers, sculptors, painter, architects Central European countries (maximalist conception): Central European economy Central European languages and literatures Central European policy Central European politicians/statesmen Community of Coal and Steel Conceptions of area studies Constructivism Croatia Croatian Czech Czech Republic Dadaism Das Mitteleuropa – ideological concept Decadence European Communities European Economic Community European Union Futurism Galicia/Halič German Germanic languages Germany Gothic Historical lands of Central Europe Humanism Hungarian Hungary Imaginism Imagism Italian Italy Kashubian Lichtenstein Lower Austria Macedonian Mannerism Maximalist and minimalist conception Modernism Moravia Music Neoclassicism New art/Modern Style/l’art nouveau, Sezession, stiĺ modern (Russian)/secese/secesia Other Slavonic/Slavic languages in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe Painting Poland Polish Preromanticism Realism (critical) Renaissance/Renascence Rococo Romance languages Romanesque style Romanian Romanticism Rumania Russian Ruthenian/Rusyn Salzburg Saxony Sculpture Serbian Silesia Slavonic/Slavic languages Slavonic/Slavic languages of Central Europe Slovak Slovakia Slovene/Slovenian Slovenia Sorbian South Tyrol/Südtirol/Alto Adige (now Italy) Styria/Steiermark Surrealism Switzerland Symbolism Synchrony and diachrony The Visegrád Four Transylvania/Transilvania/Siebenbürgen/Erdély/Ardeal/Sedmihradsko/Transylvánia Tyrol/Tirol Ugro-Finnish languages Ukraine Ukrainian United States of Europe Upper Austria Vorarlberg V. TESTS and TASKS for the Course TEST 1 1) Explicate several conceptions of Central Europe you know. 2) What is the maximalist conception of Central European area? 3) What is Basque and which countries is it used in? 4) Indicate three modern Celtic languages. 5) Indicate 2 significant Sorbian writers. 6) Indicate the novels by Franz Kafka. What phenomena is his work associated with? 7) Which national minorities live in the Slovak Republic? 8) What was the so-called Russian Action in the years of the first Czechoslovak Republic? 9) Characterize at least 3 world famous writers of the German language in the 19th century. 10) Who are the most significant 20th-century Hungarian authors? 11) Which South-Slavonic languages and literatures (all) do you know? 12) Which most significant personalities in Slavonic literatures in Central Europe do you know? 13) Indicate and characterize in short the work of the three Nobel prize winners for literature from Slavonic literatures. 14) Which Hungarian writers do you consider world famous and why? Write shortly about their work. 15) Which literary phenomena (currents, tendencies, concrete writers) from Slovak literature do you consider world famous? TEST 2 1) After the split of the Kingdom of Poland towards the end of the 18th century Warsaw was part of a) Prussia b) Russia c) Austria 2) Indicate the members of the Visegrád Four. 3) Where do he Kashubians live? 4) Indicate the languages of the Sorbs? 5) Name all the South-Slavonic languages. 6) Which national minorities can you find in Poland? 7) Which Slavonic languages are spoken in the territory of Central Europe? 8) When was the Thirty Years War? 9) Indicate the successor states of Austro-Hungary. 10) Which countries did Silesia belong to in the course of history? 11) Which countries does Bukowina belong to in the 20th century? 12) Which two big cities could you find in Galicia? 13) Indicate at least two cities in Transylvania (Siebenbürgen, Erdély, Ardeal) 14) Name the capitals of Poland, Croatia, and Slovenia. 15) What are the two main centres of the Sorbs in Saxony? TEST 3 1) Which architectural styles occur in Central European countries from the Middle Ages up to now? 2) Name the three Nobel Prize winners for literature from Central Europe. 3) Which lands of the Federal Republic of Germany are represented as Central European? 4) Name the most famous Central European mountains? 5) What are the main agricultural products Central European countries may export? TEST 4 1) Compare various conceptions of area studies? How are they conceived at your faculty and university? 2) What does the Central European area represent in your opinion? 3) What is the Albanian language and which countries is it used in? 4) Describe the typical Central European phenomenon. 5) Indicate the two 20th-century Sorbian writers. 6) Name the novels by Franz Kafka. Which phenomenon is his literary work linked to? 7) Which national minorities live in Slovakia? 8) What was the so-called Russian Supporting Action in interwar Czechoslovakia? 9) Characterize the world famous German 19th-century writers. 10) Who are the most significant Hungarian 20th-century writers? 11) Which South Slavonic languages and literatures do you know (all)? 12) Which important personalities in Slavonic literatures of the Central Europe do you know? 13) Name and characterize briefly the creations of three Nobel Prize winners for literature from Polish, Czech, and Hungarian literatures. 14) Which Czech writers do you regard a world significant and why? Write several sentences about their work. 15) Which significant representatives of Slavonic literatures in the 20th century lived and worked in emigration? TEST 5 1) What are West Slavonic languages? 2) Indicate one classical Sorbian writer? 3) Name 3 most significant Slavonic romantic poets. 4) Which of the indicated writers were awarded the Nobel Prize for literature? a) Iosif Brodsky b) Mikhail Bulgakov c) Adam Mickiewicz d) Wisława Szymborska e) Lech Walęsa f) F. M. Dostojevsky g) Jaroslav Seifert h) Ivan Bunin 5) Indiate 2 most significant writers from South Slavonic literatures. 6) Name three Slavonic postmodernists. 7) Indicate 2 literary works from Old Czech literature (up to the 15th century). 8) Which significant Slovak surrealists (in Slovak: nadrealisti) do you know? 9 Who wrote the novel Quo vadis? a) Bolesław Prus b) Alberto Moravia c) Jan Hus d) Henryk Sienkiewicz e) Petar Njegoš f) Juliusz Słowacki 10) Name the avantgarde literary and artistic groups in Slavonic literatures. 11) Which Slavonic composers do you know? 12) How is Macedonia officially called? 13) Name three significant 20th-century painters from Slavonic countries. 14) Which Slavonic countries are members of the Visegrád Four? How does the Visegrád Four support science and culture? 15) Which are the famous works written by Fyodor M. Dostoevsky? 16) What is new art (Modern Style, Jugendstil, l’art nouveau, Sezession) and what are its manifestations in the arts of Central European countries? 17) Which Slovak writers could become part of the canon of world literature? 18) What did Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius) wrote? 19) Indicate the artistic styles cultivated in Central European countries from the early Middle Ages up to the end of the 18th century? 20) Who was Igor Stravinsky? a) a Russian 19th-century painter b) a Croatian modernist novelist c) a Russian 20th-century composer d) a Polish constructivist architect Tasks 1) Try to reconstruct (using the internet data) a concise history of the following Central European cities: Cracow Chernivtsi/Tschernowitz/Chernovcy Bratislava Pest Prague Munich Dresden Salzburg Vienna Uzhgorod Košice Lemberg/Ľviv Katowice 2) Try to indicate the main stages of development of the following national literatures including the main representatives and their works: Polish Hungarian Slovak Sorbian Czech Prague German Jewish Austrian 3) Try to find the biggest cities in Central European lands of Germany (Bavaria, Saxony). 4) Which Polish cities would you consider Central European? 5) Define the system of government in Central European countries and their bodies (Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia) 6 Indicate national anthems of Central European countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia) 7) Find the basic data about the economy of Central European countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia; main branches of industry, the level of agriculture, export-import) 8) Find the main representatives of contemporary literatures in Central Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia; the second half of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st centuries) Seminar Work Create a seminar work at least in 5 standard pages (each standard page =1800 features with spaces) dealing with the regional or local past and the present (village or town/city you live in or know well). VI. A Selection of the Author’s Studies in Central European Subjects A. The Slavonic Romanticism and Its Research: Specific Features, the Past and the Present The apparition of Romanticism has been walking round the world since at least the second half of the 18th century, and according to some opinions even much longer. Some of the theorists even think that Romanticism is an eternal phenomenon which has always been present as a specific undercurrent in nearly all artistic epochs. The aim of the present treatise consists in the presentation of the specific role of Romanticism in some of the Slavonic literatures and the corresponding character, structures and recent Romanticism research in these countries bringing possibly not the radical but still a few of new bearings and shifts of emphasis in the general research of this phenomenon. In the very beginning let me mention one of my youth memories. Once upon a time, I as a student participated in the national students’ conference with a short paper in which I ardently defended the poetological significance of Romanticism; it was, of course, in former Czechoslovakia where and when the official revival of socialist realism programmes ideologically supported by state authorities began to re-appear. My tutor advised me to seek the refuge in some of more progressive Soviet conceptions defending the intrinsic aesthetic qualities of Romanticism. In Russian literature there were several convinced defenders of this current who also had an official position, such as Konstantin Paustovsky (1892-1968), admirer of the early Soviet romantic, the author of the Soviet 1920s fantasies Alexander Grin (1880-1932) whose grandfather, a Pole by birth, came to Russia as a political exile. For my student paper I chose one of Pushkin‘s Byronic narrative poem The Gypsies (1824). On this sample of Romantic poetry deeply rooted in Pushkin’s autobiographical data I tried to demonstrate Pushkin’s romantic aesthetics but, at the same time, I met with his “non-romantic Romanticism” and aimed at explicating its nature. Later this phenomenon began to be called “post-Romanticism”; I understood it in a wider context as a typical characteristics of the development of Russian and with certain corrections also of some other Slavonic literatures and termed it “pre-post effect (paradox)”. This contribution continues a series of our articles, studies and reviews concerning Romanticism in Slavonic literatures and of the specific features of the development of Slavonic literatures in general and of Russian literature in particular (Pospíšil, 1999, 2002, 2003 1, 2006 2, 2011 2). This thesis was illustratively demonstrated on the development and structure of the Russian novel (Pospíšil, 1998 2, 1998 3, 1998 4, 2005 2). Some theorists of the novel assert that the rise of the novel in Russia has been connected with 18th century; the famous medievalist D. S. Likhachev finds nothing in old Russian literature that would remind him of the novel, though we could not neglect a rich layer of national folk epic poetry (byliny), Igor Tale (if it is regarded as part of Russian medieval literature), various chronicles, hagiographies, sermons and didactic treatises, war or military tales ("voinskaya povest’"). It is obvious that the domestic, autochthonous sources of the novel were originally weak, later were getting stronger, but they cannot be totally omitted. The term "autochthonous" in the Russian environment does not mean the pure East-Slavonic sources, but also the transformed Byzantine and other genre models imported from both the West (via Germany and Poland) or the East-West space (East and Central Asia via Byzantine Empire, Bulgaria or Serbia). The word "foreign" in connection with the evolution of the novel is, therefore, used for a huge wave of European prose works which has been penetrating into Russia since the 18th century in the frame of Peter’s ideological campaign. Russian literature differs from other European literatures by its evolutionary discontinuity consisting in several gaps in its development and in its morphological and generic (genre) structure, and in the poetological continuity modelled by the new Russian literature. The example of Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller (Mandát, 1982) and Radishchev’s Journey shows that in the Russian 18th-century literature the medieval literature permeates with new artifacts and that under the mask of a mere imitation of European currents and styles there are Renaissance paradigms; for this reason, the so-called 18th-century Russian literature represents a conventional term, a transitory zone in which the old and the new literature must be literally deciphered from one work to another: the medieval and the new literature do not form a consequence, but they develop in a parallel way, co-exist as the old Russian literature penetrates into the new one. The authentic original Russian novel arises in the 18th century from various sources under the impact of West European literatures and under their direct influence. At the same time, it is evident that these strong impulses might be accepted because of the epic models functioning in Russian literature which prepared the whole of Russian literature for adopting these impulses: the rise of the Russian novel is, therefore, closely connected with the beginnings of the new Russian literature. The unfinished process of secularization in Russian literature led to the unpreparedness to adopt European novel models: the Russian way to the novel was, therefore, more complicated, there were many inner barriers which had to be overcome. The Russians did not accept the Western types of the novel also because of the pre-post effect (paradox) which seems to be one of the dominant feature of the evolutionary paradigm of Russian literature in general: the imperfect imitation of foreign genre models (pre) seems to represent a genre innovation (post); therefore since the 18th century the Russian novel has had an experimental character, has been regarded as strange, peculiar, unnatural, paradoxical and absurd. Its huge, amorphous composition (compare Karamzin’s Letters or Tolstoy's War and Peace) has always surprised and astonished a European reader (Anderson, 1974, Nebel, 1967, Cross, 1971, Orlov, 1977, Osmnáste..., 1996, Pospíšil, 1998, 4, 1999, 2, 2005, 2006 1, 2006 3, 2008 1, 2008 2, 2010, 2011 2, Kozhinov, 1977, Mathauserová, 1986). The European models of the novel have often been radically transformed in Russia: it also concerned the confessional novel of the period of sentimentalism, pre-Romanticism and Romanticism cultivated, for example, by Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) and Alfred de Musset (1810-1857). While the composition of their works is one-sided, monographical in the sense of an individual confessional narration, Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) in his cyclic novel Hero of Our Time (Герой нашего времени, 1839-1840) creates the hierarchy of narrators and a complicated narrative structure in which Boris Eichenbaum once demonstrated the tension between the story (фабула) and the plot (сюжет) when he deciphered the chronological order of the original work (Бела‚ Максим Максимыч, Журнал Печорина, Предисловие, Тамань, Окончание Журнала Печорина, Княжна Мэри, Фаталист). The formation of the novel from short stories or novellas will be repeated in the development of the Russian novel many times, e.g. in N. S. Leskov's chronicle novels, I. S. Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches built on the principle of physiologies - in the 20th century Issac Babel constructs his Red Cavalry (Конармия, 1928) on this very principle. The romantic confession becomes the psychological novel and the formation of the hierarchy leading from the animal to the superman in which Lermontov might be one of Nietzsche's predecessors, transformed the model into the philosophical artefact standing very close to German Erziehungsroman (Pospíšil, 1999, 2005 2, 2006, 2008). All the Slavonic literatures in general and Russian literature in particular have followed – since the 18th century – the models prevalently of French literature, but not perfectly; the Czecc phenomenologist, a follower of Husserl‘s philosophy, literary scholar Zdeněk Mathauser (1920-2007) (Mathauser, 1989) characterized it as a dynamic triangle of habilitas – superhabilitas – metahabilitas. The third phase is connected with the refusal of artistic perfection and with the search for new ways in poetics trying to form a new style and formulate an innovative artistic programme. Therefore, for example, the so-called miracle of the Golden Age of the Russian classical and modern 19^th and 20^th-century literature is closely linked with the overcoming of European literary models as a result of their imperfect imitation which appear, for example, in the model of the Russian vaudeville by A. S. Griboedov (1795-1829), the grotesque Gogolian comedies, existential elements in M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and A. Suchovo-Kobylin or the poetics of the absurd in Russian fiction, in the formation of the epic novel in War and Peace, of the polyphonic novel –according to Mikhail Bakhtin - in F. M. Dostoevsky and of the experimental novel in the work of Andrey Bely, a predecessor of James Joyce and Marcel Proust (Averincev, 1976, Bailey, 1966, Bem, 1928, Berdyaev, 1923, Brown, 1980, Catteau, 1978, Čyževskyj, 1960). It is inevitable to take all this into consideration so as to understand the role of individual literary currents, genre and the poetics in Slavonic literatures including Romanticism itself. Thus, pre-post effect (paradox) represents a specific development of Slavonic literatures in general and Russian literature in particular, the feature which probably caused their leading role in some of the periods in the course of the two recent centuries. Romanticism in Slavonic literatures has had even a more specific function than in other European literatures. Though, for example, Czech literature in closer contact with Germans had its own high-quality medieval Gothic poetry compared with that of Geoffrey Chaucer in England (the dynastic connection of the two kingdoms in the 14^th centzury is generally well-known – Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Roman-German emperor Charles the Fourth, who became a Queen of England, was celebrated in Chaucer’s Legends of Good Women) – for example Smil Flaška of Pardubice poetic school; his famous work A New Council, in Czech Nová rada). Compared with the development of Polish literature, it is important to note the Czech literature was quite strong in Gothic times while later due to the Hussite Wars the initial stage of the Renaissance and Humanism was slowed down and penetrated into the Czech culture only in the second half of the 15^th century and, mainly, in the 16^th century. The Renaissance artistic phenomena were rather aesthetically weak and exceptional, the prevalent majority of artfefacts was linked with scholarly works influenced by the philosophy of humanism. The new beginnings of nearly all Slavonic literatures with the exception of Russian were connected with Romanticism and national revivals, often under the German impact and with Gereman inspiration which appeared as early as the end of the 18^th century in science and philosophy, later in linguistics and literary scholarship and in arts and literature itself. So, Romanticism in Slavonic countries is of great developmental importance and thus, again paradoxically, it had to bear much more thematic burden than in other European literatures. It has been always deformed or developed in another way. In this case, Russian Romanticism has its own specific evolutionary pattern because it started to appear – due to the reform of the Romanovs, especially of Peter the Great, approximately at the same time as in England, later than in Germany if we take into consideration the “frűh Deutsche Romantik” or university Romanticism, and earlier than the genuine French Romanticism of the first wave (François René Chateaubriand). So as to chacterize the main features of Romanticism in Slavonic literatures it is inevitable to mention the prolonged vestiges of neo-classicism, Enlightenment, sentimentalism, pre-Romanticism, or even more distant artistic poetics, such as rococo or Baroque. The Slavonic Romanticism should be characterized rather as a permanent permeation of heterogeneous poetics and styles, later touching neo-Romanticism, and early modernism, especially decadence and symbolism – all these currents existed at the same time, synchronously. First of all, there are general conceptions of Romanticism or Romanticisms, to express it in the words of a famous polemic between Arthur Lovejoy and René Wellek. The problem sems to be eternal one concerning the sense of the holistic conception of Romanticism as a poetological system. Are there only “Romanticisms” having something in common or is there a whole system of poetic devices forming one entity? There are at the same time traditional and innovative conceptions of Romanticism and the question of the systemic character of one Romanticism is a dominant one. Another problem is closely connected with the dilemma between Romanticism as a historically defined and delimited phenomenon going back to the period of the second half of the 18^th century and the first half of the 19^th century, or the “eternal” current existing in all arts from Antiquity up to postmodernism. Or – even in a narrower sense - this is the artistic current representing the opposition to classical (ancient, Graeco-Roman) art. The school conception of Romanticism the pupils and students usually learn defines Romanticism as a strictly historically and temporarily defined current; it is necessary to take into consideration that the termini a quo and termini ad quem are different in various national literatures in which individual boundaries occur: in German literature the 1780s as „die deutsche Romantik“, in England and Scottland the edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798), Robert Burns and Walter Scott, in France most probably the novellas by René François Chatteaubriand, in Russia the 1790s as a starting point of the poetic work of Vaisily Zhukovsky, in Czech literature probably the edition of Mácha‘s May (1836); the termini ad quem might be the beginnings of realism in France (the 1830s), the Erziehungsroman by J. W. Goethe in Germany though there are several waves of Romanticism in France and in Germany from Novalis, Achim von Arnim, E. T. Hoffmann up to Heinrich Heine, from F. R. Chatteaubriand to V. Hugo, in Russia the edition of Lermontov‘s novel Hero fo Our Time (1840) and Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) etc. Pushkin in his commentaries on literature mentioned the Provence trubadours, the inventors of rhyme, were the first European romantics though we could speak even about ancient romantics in Greece and Rome. The word “romantic” derived from “roman” and “roman” from “romanus” goes back to the definition of the language or later to the genre or even more precisely to its certain type (adventurous and love stories) and, last but not least, to an artistic current. So we could quite easily deduct “romantic” works ex post from all the periods of literature defining it as a protest against normative, classical stages of literary development. There is even a study conerning the Igor Tale as a romantic work which is quite delicate if we take into account that it might be a fake going back to the end of the 18^th century (Keenan, 2004, Pospíšil, 2007). The Czech literary historian Slavomír Wollman described its artistic qualities towards the end of the 1950s as an authentic medieval work of art (Wollman, 1958). On the other hand, Romanticism might be traced even in post-romantic periods: if we recognize that post-Romanticism, neo-Romanticism and the whole of modernism with its single currents, such as decadence, symbolism, imagism/imaginism, futurism, constructivism etc. are of romantic origin and substance and that the avantgardist 20^th-century movement is highly romantic in its social and political protests as well as in artistic innovations, there is the problem concerning the romantic basis of postmodernism. Though intertextuality might be regarded as rather a rationalistic phenomenon, the principle of play and the existential instability, and the tendency towards mass literary structures (Trivialliteratur) and virtual constructions could be considered very romantic. We have already mentioned the temporal boundaries of Romanticism (termini a quo, termini ad quem). This is also connected with the problem of terminology in various national languages, at least European: classical, Classicism, neoclassicism, preromanticism, Enlightenment, Romanticism, post-Romanticism, neo-Romanticism etc. In Central Europe the term neoclassicism means the 20^th-century current in all arts going back to simple, highly transparent style opposing – in a way - modernist tendencies towards originality and innovation on the one hand, and trying to synthetize these innovative trends on the other (E. Hemingway, K. Čapek) while in England it is connected with the 17^th- and 18^th-century currents (classicism means the art of Antiquity). We have also metioned the undisputable national variants of Romanticism and its connection with national revivals; there is, moreover, one more interesting thing: the national revivals automatically represent – despite their own substance – romantic phenomena. Speaking about Slavonic literatures we could give the examples of Czech, Slovene, Serbian, Sorbian, Ukrainian, Byelorusian, Macedonian etc. national revivals going from the beginning of the 19th up to the beginning of the 20th century. Romanticism also meant the crucial and radical restructuralization of the genre system of literature. This led to the death of certain genre forms (heroic epic) on the one hand and to the rise of new genres and genre groupings on the other (narrative poem, historical novel) or to the content and form transformations (Shelley‘s Ode to the West Wind). Romanticism occured in all Slavonic literatures in different paradigms due to the intrinsic nature if each; so the study of Romanticism in Slavonic countries should to be based on the very nature of Romanticism in each literature. The first specific feature of the Romanticism research in Slavonic countries is the revelation of its mixed poetological character as mentioned above and its link to national and nationalistic movements and revivals in the 19^th century (Murko, 1897, Szyjkowski, 1946, Neupokojeva – Sötér, 1973, Klátik, 1977). The prevalent tendency is the holistic and anthropological conception. In opposition to the purely socio-literary structure of Romanticism explicated in the famous book by István Sötér and Irina Neupokojeva going back to the 1970s (Neupokojeva - Sötér, 1973) the contemporary tendencies widen the range of the research towards cultural and area studies on the comparative basis (Pospíšil, 2009 1, 2009 2), We would stress especially the shift of emphasis towards the integration of comparative and genre studies from a more general artistic and cultural angle. Even if there are some general features of Romanticism research in Slavonic countries there are also sharp contradictions and controversies depending not only on the existence of different methodologies, but also on the position of Romanticism in national literatures, cultures nad mentalities. Though the impact of Romantic vision is strong in all Slavonic literatures we could emphasize the situation in Poland where Romanticism represented a sort of national ideology which could be adored or criticised in the whole course of Polish history. Theferore the Polish works on Romanticism – even those of highly general and theoretical character - focus more or less on Polish literature or try to apply the results reached in Polish Romanticism research to more general supranational levels (Kowalczykowa, 2008, Romantyzm..., 2008, Janion, 2007, Siwicka, 1999, Witkowska, 2003). The specific features of the Czech research of Romanticism is its general cultural approach and the integration of spatial and temporal categories due to Vladimír Macura’s conception of Czech national revival (Macura, 1983, 1995) leading to its demythization (Hrbata – Procházka, 1993, 1999, 2005). It is a little surprising and embarassing at the same time that quite a rich Slovak research deal or more less not only with Slovak literature, but mainly with its general poetics and cultural meaning, sometimes it focuses on other literatures, especially Russian. One of the exceptional books belonging to Slovak Romanticism research connects the Romantic movement with globalization in its universal dimension – the author, a specialist in Slovak and Hungarian studies, literary scholar, politician, diplomatist and writer Rudolf Chmel looks at cultural globalization as one of the by-products of romantic thought and at the same time solves his own very Slovak problem of the struggle for the urban character of Slovak literature, the fight that victoriously ended only in the second half of the 20th century (Chmel, 2009). We have already spoken about the permeation of various currents in Slavonic Romanticism in general on the one hand and its strong impact on the furthre development of literature on the other as we found out its traces in modernism, avant-garde as well as in postmodernism. On the example of the Russian-Czech Gothic link (the poetics of Gothic prose – Schauerroman, roman frénétique, noir) we could demonstrate both the differences in single national literatures and the general impact of pre-romantic artistic structures on the rise of Romanticism and of the whole modern and postmodern literary consciousness. The 18^th and early 19^th –century Russian literature developed under the impact of West European models: the sentimentalist (travel and epistolary novels), picaresque and Gothic. The subject of the present contribution has much to do with the general pattern of the development of Russian literature. The Gothic link in Russian literature is part of the permanent conflict between the dramatic, extrinsic, intensive and intrinsic, extensive, describing, ethnographic and chronicle principles. It is prevalently associated with the development of the Russian novel in which the clash of the above-mentioned principles is obvious and dominant: while the static or stationary, passive, descriptive, chronicle principle have its roots in the autochthonous, Byzantine-Russian spiritual basis, the dramatic, intensive, adventurous elements belong to Western models which have been penetrating to Russia since the 17^th century; the majority of Asian elements came to Russia via Europe. One of the most influential factors of these clashes and of the tendency towards their synthesis was the unfinished process of secularisation: many secular literary genres including the novel were thus felt as unacceptable, even sinnful; therefore the final poetic shape of such artifacts was obviously different (the already mentioned pre-post effect or pre-post paradox: the imitation of Western models led Russian literature to the creation of peculiar, rather exotic literary forms and genres which seem to be an experimental new phase of the literary development while they represent an unfinished process of imitation of European morphological models). Apart from those who prefer the European, imitative Russian literary models and from those who, on the other hand, accentuate the genuine core of Russian cultural models speaking about 250 years of Russia’s cultural delay we stress the gradual absorption of Western models which look peculiar as they were originally permeated by the domestic, Russo-Byzantine and folklore roots: therefore the Russian baroque might appear in the 17^th and 18^th centuries as well as in 19^th-century Gogol’s short stories, sentimentalism might be absorbed by Nikolai Emin as well as by A. Radishchev and N. Karamzin in the 18^th century, but also by Dostoevsky in Poor People (1846) serving the means of the polemic with the poetics of the Russian Natural School, and Romanticism might prevail in V. Zhukovsky and A. Pushkin as well in Slavophile movement up to the 1880s. Such permanent returns to cultural models, currents and morphological patterns have seemed to be the typical features of the Russian literary development up to the 20^th century (de Vogűé, 1886, Istorija russkogo romana..., 1962, Hrabák, 1981, Bjornson, 1977, Demin, 1977, Erlich, 1969, Freeborn 1973, Fanger, 1978, Kautman, 1992, Gazda – Pospíšil, 2007). The Gothic pattern (Fialová, 1973, Hennesy, 1978, Simpson, 1986, Pospíšil, 2002 1) was probably the weakest one, and it had its reasons consisting in the Russian literary evolution; at the time the works of the English Gothic novel were penetrating into other European literatures, Russian literature was more oriented on the model of the Enlightenment and rationalism; therefore the first Russian translations, for example, of Anne Radcliffe appeared in an old rationalistic poetic code. That is probably the reason why Russian literature preferred to adopt one specific layer of Gothic patterns, i. e. the picture of the shattered old rational world as the way not towards the pure romantic rebellious attitudes, but rather to the hidden, „superrational“, superrealist core of human and cosmic existence (see Dostoevsky’s slogan that he is „the realist in the supreme sense”). One of the first traces of the Gothic inspiration in Russian literature might be associated with N. M. Karamzin whose epistolary travel novel Письма русского путешественника (1791-1792, completely 1801) played a key-role in the formation of modern Russian novel. Moreover, Karamzin’s peculiar book of travels - rather a philosophical and a literary treatise - is a valuable document of the historical events and the mentality of the last decades of the Age of Reason. Substantial parts of his Letters of a Russian Traveller are devoted to England and English literature; the author himself was a passionate reader of everything English, especially of English sentimentalist poetry and prose. His short story The Island of Bornholm (1794, Остров Борнгольм) inspired by the voyage in the Baltic contains a vague incestuous motif at the background of the medieval Gothic scenery typical of the island itself. The Russian tradition of enigmatic prose has its roots in German romantic movement connected with E. T. A. Hoffmann whose poetics appeared in Russia in the works of Antonij Pogorelsky (1787-1836), born as Aleksei Alekseevich Perovsky, illegitimate son of Count A. K. Razumovsky and countess Marija Sobolevskaja who spent two years in military service in Dresden. After a short time service in the Ministry of Education he was retired. Since the beginning of the 1820s he has spent th rest of his life in his estate in Ukraine. His most important work The Double or My Evenings in Little Russia (1828, Двойник‚ или мои вечера в Малороссии) introduced the figure of a double (Doppelgänger) continued then by Dostoevsky. In his fantasy for children The Black Hen or the The Subterranean People (1829, Черная курица‚ или Подземные жители) he described a secret underground kingdom, though the whole story has rather a didactic and moralistic character. The novella The Convent Girl (1833, Монастырка) exploits the popular subject of European literature continuing sentimentalist poetics. The traces of the Gothic inspiration in Pogorelsky’s prose works are rare and go back rather to German romantic tradition („deutsche Romantik“) evoking the machinery of the Schauerroman and medieval folklore motifs. The Russian Decembrist prose writer Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (1797-1837), on the other hand, understood the Gothic pattern as a chance to manifest the existential dimension of human life in his novels The Castle Wenden (Замок Венден, 1823), The Castle Neuhausen (Замок Нейгаузен, 1824), The Traitor (1824, Изменник) and The Tournament at Revel (1824, Ревельский турнир) which also proclaimed the revolt against the feudal ethics and symbolically appeared on the eve of the Decembrist uprising, F. M. Dostoevsky used the Gothic machinery with sharp anti-catholic tendency expressed, for example, in Lewis’ Monk (the picture of the world here could be compared with the similar subject of Diderot’s enlightenment novel The Nun), especially in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov in which the whole Spanish scenery exploited by the English Gothic novel was applied. Dostoevsky’s predecessor even in the application of enigmatic tradition was N. V. Gogol. The early works of this Russo-Ukrainian author inspired by Ukrainian foklore motifs are, however, regarded as a mere reflection of the Romantic adoration of oral tradition. Even his early short stories Evenings in a Village near Dikanka and Mirhorod (Вечера на хуторе близ Доиканьки) have common motifs with Gogol’s famous novellas from St. Petersburg cycle and his famous bitter comedies and with his „poema“ (originally lyric-epic poem, in this case a long poetical narrative) Dead Souls (Мертвые души‚ 1842). The Gogolian world seems to be an enachanted kingdom the enchantment of which is represented by animalised people (later a popular Kafkian motif), by a mechanical and puppet character of heroes and heroines, by the scenes of petrefaction. The Russian perception of Gothic motifs was at first rare and rather mechanical though they might be connected with the extrinsic features of old Russian foklore tradition of devil and „yurodivye“ stories which – together with the exorcist poetics penetrated even into The Life of Avvakum (Житие протопопа Аввакума, им самим написанное, 1672-75) and, on the other hand, into other secular, 18^th-century picaresque structures of A Tale of Savva Grudtsyn or A Tale of Frol Skobeev. F. M. Dostoevsky and his Russian successors in the symbolist and modernist generation in general (Merezhkovsky, Sologub, Andreev) transformed the extrinsic, outer poetics into an intrinsic pattern: the motif of a double connected with Hoffmann’s poetics perceived through the work of Antonij Pogorelsky (1787-1836) as well as the features of the French roman frénétique and of the German Schauerroman manifested its impact upon the world literature. The Czech literary situation was a bit different because of the stronger and more direct impact of the German Schauerroman and the French roman noir or frénétique: the English Gothic patterns were perceived rather through the prism of French and German cultural patterns. They can be found in Jakub Arbes’ (1840-1914) romances called „romanettos“ in the Czech environment with mysterious motifs and enigmatic characters, often of religious and magic significance. Approximately at the same time the works of the famous Czech authoress Božena Němcová (1820? - 1862) appeared: her picture of the world is rather idyllic, elegiac and sentimental, especially when she writes about the Czech nobility which – as she hopes – should play the similar role as the Polish aristocracy in its own country. The castle as the emblem of the nobility may have both the idyllic or elegiac and the enigmatic, mysterious and tragic character, may serve as a refuge and, at the same time, as a threat. Němcová’s motif of the castle (chateau) from her novel In the Castle and Beneath (1856, V zámku a podzámčí) fascinated Franz Kafka (1883-1924): his castle motif in his famous novel could be called „the inverted romantic idyll“ reflecting some aspects of the Gothic machinery which was, however, transformed into psychological structures: the irrational, but visible horrors of medieval castles and their ruins become the horrors inside human souls evoked by and connected with the castle scenery which symbolized a specific trigger of disasterous psychic processes. We might even say that the Czech idyllic and sentimental genre basis served as a poetic background for Kafka’s literary experiments. But there is another surprising or even shocking feature of this literature: the horrible hints and the world of mysterious threats are hidden under the surface forming a strange subterranean river going through all the literary streams covering both naive Romanticism, Enlightenment anti-Romanticism and neoromanticism as well as the elements of the rationalistic vision of the world. Němcová is not the first one to initiate this model: there is, of course, Karel Jaromír Erben (1811-1870) - called an anti-romantic romantic - with his poetic cycle A Bunch of Flowers of National Legends (1853, 1861, Kytice z pověstí národních) strongly influnced by folklore models, but innovating and transforming them in the similar way as Gogol in his pseudofolklore Ukrainian tales (this artificial horror atmosphere I tried to demonstrate in The Phenomenon of Madness in the 19^th and 20^th-Century Russian Literature which appeared in The Evenings in a Village near Dikan’ka or Mirhorod). Thus, we may even say that the Kafkian model of the Gothic pattern continuing the Czech link was based on real structural elements in the Czech artifacts themselves. In Kafka’s novels, especially in The Castle (Das Schloss) in The Trial (Der Prozess) the Russian, Dostoevskyan link is permeated by the mentioned Czech genre basis. The Kafkian link transforming the Gothic and idyllic imagery was continued by several Czech 20^th-century writers and philosophers. One of them was Jan Weiss (1892-1972) whose work was influenced by expressionistic poetics, e. g. A House With One Hundred Floors (1929, Dům o tisíci patrech), and in his minor enigmatic prose The Mirror Which Is Retarded (1964, Zrcadlo, které se opožďuje) or Uncle Žuliján’s Meteor (1930, Meteor strýce Žulijána). Ladislav Klíma (1878-1928)– apart from his philosophical writings – such as Treatises and Dictates (1922, Traktáty a diktáty), A Second and Eternity (1927, Vteřina a věčnost) and The World as the Conscience and Nothing (1904, Svět jako vědomí a nic) – wrote interesting fragmentary novels, e. g. The Czech Novel (partly 1967, complete version 1993, Český román), The Famous Nemesis (1932, Slavná Nemesis) and The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch (1928, Utrpení knížete Sternenhocha) in which he peculiarly reflected Gothic inspiration. Egon Hostovský, a Czech-Jewish writer, diplomatist and then emigré in Norway and the USA who continued the Kafkian tradition in Czech literature in his early novellas based on the poetics of Czech expressionism The Closed Door (1926, Zavřené dveře), The Path Along the Way (1928, Stezka podél cesty), The Ghetto in Them (1928, Ghetto v nich), The Case of Professor Körner (1932, Případ profesora Körnera), The Black Gang (1933, Černá tlupa), The Fire Raiser (1935, Žhář) and The House Without Lord (1937, Dům bez pána) exploited the Gothic motifs in a Kafkian sense, as well as Václav Řezáč (1901-1956) in his early novels The Black Light (1940, Černé světlo), The Wittness (1942, Svědek) and The Boundary (1944, Rozhraní) where he plays with the light–darkness boundary symbolising the evolution of the psychic life of man. Jaroslav Havlíček (1896-1943) evoked the hororr atmosphere of a Czech provincial town and the whole sultry atmosphere on the eve of the Second World War and of the Nazi occupation in a peculiar milieu of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren) in his novels The Oil Lamps (1935, Petrolejové lampy), The Invisible (1937, Neviditelný), The Third Woman (1939, Ta třetí) and Helimadoe (1940). This link could be prolonged to the period of postmodernism, but the real Gothic trace would become unclear and vague; so our method is rather a historical and evolutionary, genetic one. The Gothic link in Russian literature goes on also in the 20^th century, but we tried to show just the chain leading from the Gothic poetics towards the Russian Romanticism (A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky) and the neoromantic structures in Dostoevsky and further to Kafka who also reflected the Czech literary experience associated with the emblem of the castle and the layers of the uncertainty hidden under the idyllic, sentimental and elegiac surface, and further to the Czech expressionist and psychoanalytical inspiration. From the genre standpoint the Gothic form arose as the counterpoint of the idyllic and elegiac structures; the other side of the idyllic scenery with the absence of any conflict is the permanent threat and uncertainty evoked by Gothic poetics; the modern psychological novel frequently reminded us of a sort of an intrinsic horror which arose as a result of the permeation of the extrinsic Gothic machinery and the intrinsic tendency towards idyllic stability and the relatively petrified order of things and men. Thus the Gothic inspiration affected the contemporary literature in two dominant ways: it gave the modern prose the visible machinery or the background and, at the same time, the impulse for the intrinsic revaluation of the psychic life of man as a permanent anxiety, ambiguity and uncertainty. They are also the reasons for the new function and existence of these structures in postmodernist literature. This example also shows one of the tendencies of Slavonic Romanticism research influencing the general vision of Romanticism as a philosophical and artistic system: the dialectic tension between its concrete phenomena on the one hand and its general, “eternal” presence in the process of the formation of modern literature reflecting the holistic picture of man and his world on the other. Romanticism as an artistic current covers all the Slavonic literatures having, however, quite a different character than in other European works of art. It is caused not only by its role in the process of national revivals in which the romantic aesthetics served as a model for practical political behavioiur, but also by its mixed, compromise nature influenced by the remnants of Enlightenment, neoclassicism, rococo and the final stage of Baroque – due to the functioning of the so-called pre-post effct (paradox) as I call it. The most progressive pattern of Romanticism in Slavonic literatures can be found in Russian literature though evene here it may serve practical political purposes connected, for example, with the war against Napoleon in 1812 and later with the Decembrists (the end of the 1810s and the first half of the 1820s). In its first wave, Russian Romanticism was closely linked to the tradition of neoclassicism, especially in Pushkin’s poetry, prose and drama, in the second and final wave it reached its extreme positions in Lermontov‘s lyric expression in his poetry as well as in his novel Hero of Our Time (1840). The Poles - though their Romanticism also served the national purposes expressing their desire for the restoration of Poland’s independence, created a specific pattern of romantic poetics based on general principles (Polish messianism). The specific kernel of Czech Romanticism goes back to the tradition of neoclassicism and Enlightenment philosophy enriched by the stylisation of folk poetry, very often with general existential patterns (the two antipodes: Karel Jaromír Erben – Karel Hynek Mácha). The 20^th-century Czech literary development manifested the significance of Mácha’s poem May (1836) and his prose and drama as a predecessor of modern currents, for example, surrealism; the Czech surrealists of the 1930s considered his prose Krkonošská pouť (A Pilgrimage to Krkonoše/Riesengebirge/Giant Mountains) a typical sample of pre-surrealist poetics. In other Slavonic literatures Romanticism created a shape expressing the spirit of a nation, usually a folklore model of a desire for national and cultural autonomy: the folklore stream was stronger in South (less in Slovene, more in Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian/Macedonian, in Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina) and East Slavonic (Russian, Byelorusian, Ukrainian) literatures, a little weaker in West Slavonic literatures (besides the already mentioned in Slovak, Sorbian – both Upper and Lower, Kashubian). To sum up: Slavonic Romanticism in general is an irregular, mixed current, a permeation of various 18^th and 19^th-century artistic tendencies, often retarded, forming a complex epoch petrified by the remnants of neoclassicism, even folk Baroque and rococo, and the beginnings of realism, post-Romanticism and neo-Romanticism and the initial phase of modernism (mainly decadence). The beginnings of the traditional conception of Slavonic Romanticism might be linked with the original study by Matija (Matthias, Matyáš) Murko (Murko, 1897, Matija Murko, 2005, Pospíšil, 2005). The same type of the rerearch is represented by Marian Szyjkowski (Szyjkowski, 1946). In both monographs Romanticism is explicated on a comparative basis of contactology, mutual influences (German impact on Czech Romanticism i Murko, Polish inspiration in Czech Romanticism). The traditional comparative concept of Romanticism was also formed by the typological characteristics of its poetics, sometimes connected with genre history and theory (Neupokojeva-Sötér, 1973, Klátik, 1977). The new poetological and methodological trend might be expressed by the latest anthologies though sometimes their image of national Romanticisms does not correspond to the complexity of texts and to the richness of their genre forms (Slovenskí romantici, 2002, Rozkošný hrob..., 2009, Mrtví tanečníci.., 2010) and, mainly, by the conceptions based on the general comparative methodology of European Romanticism (Hrbata – Procházka, 1993, Hrbata, 1999, Hrbata – Procházka, 2005, Romantismus v české a polské literatuře, 2000). The contemporary concepts of Romanticism are based on the system of cultural symbols and signs, on spatio-temporal relations inside the literary artefacts. Their problematic aspects are connected with the absence of specific features of Slavonic, especially Russian Romanticism which is very often excluded from their complex analyses. The original contribution to Slavonic Romanticism research could be represented by Polish literary scholarship of the last years though it sometimes suffers from the absence of more expressed comparative and genre aspects as already mentioned above (Kowalczykowa, 2008, Romantyzm, 2008, Janion, 2007, Siwicka, 1999, Witkoweska, 2003). On the contrary, Ukrainian attempts at the analysis of romamtic poetics and thouhgt/philosophy are very often of comparative and topical character demonstrating the romantic impact even upon postmodernism (Nahlik, 2003, Melnyčenko, 2003). The Slovak Romanticism research is being realised in two conceptual entities: besides the already mentioned example, it focuses on its international character (Romatizmus reflektujúci..., 1997) or on its new methodological conceptions, often in Slavonic environment. This type of Romanticism research could be represented by a specific scholartly school from Banská Bystrica connected with the already deceased literary theorist Andrej Červeňák, Sergey Makara and also by the author of this contribution (Pospíšil, 2004) and some other regular collaborators. Their activity gave birth to a series of volumes called Slovanský romantizmus (Slavonic Romanticism, e. g. 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006), one was devoted to the search for Romanticism roots in the remote past (Makara – Kiseleva, 2002). The author of the present study dealt with the terminological dispersion of the notion “Romanticism” in contemporary literary theory (Pospíšil, 2011). He accentuates the meaning of Romanticism as a rather “soft” variety of poetological phenomena going back to the roots of German “Romantik” and often quotes the recent book by B. Horyna on German early Romanticism. The author deals with Romanticism both as a concrete historical literary stream and as an “eternal” cultural feature penetrating into the literary development in its complexity. In this sense, he also mentions the problem of the romantic transformations of the former neoclassicist, normative genre system, the problem of literary character and the significance of Romanticism as a source of “new mythology”. Unfortunately, the Banská Bystrica school of Romanticism research ceased to exist after the liquidation of the Philological Faculty of the Matej Bel University. This cluster of problems forms a initial stage of the evolutionary aspect of Romanticism as part of historical poetics (Horyna, 2005). Besides the traditional opinion according to which Romanticism has been connected with the end of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century, there were and still are the already discussed views of a much older development of this artistic current or style going back even to ancient times or at least to medieval lyrics. Termini ad quem are also very indefinite and amorphous demonstrating the conception of „eternal“ Romanticism as a basis of strong artistic currents and tendencies influencing modernism and avant-garde movements. So, Romanticism as an artistic system is not dead, it is still alive in various tendencies and poetic patterns touching the limits of imagination and radical political concepts in Baroque and decorative arts, rococo, New Art (Modern Style, Jugendstil, Secesion, стиль модерн) and also forming a poetic undercurrent of underground art (Rotrekl, 1995). A specific and original role is played by Romanticism in Central Europe both in Slavonic, German-Austrian, Hungarian, North Italian, Romanian and other literatures belonging to this area characterized by evolutionary irregularities, multilingual and multicultural nature: due to the role of Romanticism in the development of Slavonic national literatures in the process of national revivals this current as a general cultural phenomenon plays the role of a developmental accelerant enabling Slavonic literatures to accept more easily the impulses of European modernism and 20th-century avant-garde movements. So, Romanticism in Slavonic literatures – and this fact is permanently being reflected in the conceptions of Romanticism in the rerearch in Slavonic countries – has a key position in historical poetics an in the formation of literature and other kinds of art in general. LITERATURE ANDERSON, R. (1974): N. M. Karamzin’s Prose. Houston 1974. AVERINCEV, S. 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(2005) (2): Literatura – člověk – postava: spory kolem věčného tématu. In: Slovanský romantizmus – obraz človeka v slovanskom romantizme. Katedra slovanských jazykov, Filologická fakulta Univerzity Mateja Bela, Banská Bystrica 2005, pp. 22-29. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2005) (3): Ruský román znovu navštívený. Historie, uzlové body vývoje, teorie a mezinárodní souvislosti: Od počátků k výhledu do současnosti. Ed.: Jaroslav Malina, obálka, grafická a typografická úprava Josef Zeman – Tomáš Mořkovský, Martin Čuta, ilustrace Boris Jirků. Nadace Universitas, Edice Scientia, Akademické nakladatelství CERM v Brně, Nakladatelství a vydavatelství NAUMA v Brně, Brno 2005, 209 pp. ISBN 80-7204-423-0. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2006) (1): Nové žánrové tvary v současné próze: prolegomena a několik příkladů. In: Konštanty romantizmu a Sergej Makara. Filologická fakulta Univerzity Mateja Bela, Banská Bystrica 2006, pp. 285-299. ISBN 80-8083-322-2. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2006) (2): Romantismus slovanský, evropský a světový: šíře a hloubka. In: Slovanský romantismus v európskych súvislostiach. Katedra slovanských jazykov FiF UMB, Banská Bystrica 2006, pp. 8-21. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2006) (3): Романная одержимость камердинера Александра Пушкина. Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 49, z. 1-2, 2006, pp. 5-22. PL ISSN 0084-4446. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2008) (1): Srovnávací studie (Komparatistika, slavistika, rusistika a česko-slovenské souvislosti). UCM, Trnava 2008, 262 pp. ISBN 978-80-8105-060-2. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2008) (2): Pátrání po nové identitě. Rusistické a vztahové reflexe. SvN Regiony, Středoevropské centrum slovanských studií, Brno 2008, 273 pp. ISBN 80-86735-15-X POSPÍŠIL, I. (2008) (3): The Park-Garden Emblem and Alternatives of Literary Evolution (between England, Russia and Moravia). In: Space of a Garden – Space of Culture. Edited by Grzegorz Gazda and Mariusz Gołąb. Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008, pp. 91-104. ISBN (10): 1-84718-627-0, ISBN (13): 9781847186270. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2009) (1): Areál a jeho vztahy. In: Novaja rusistika 2009, No. 2, pp. 70-78. ISSN 1803-4950. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2010): Základní okruhy filologické a literárněvědné metodologie a teorie (elementy, materiály, úvahy, pojetí, texty). Univerzita sv. Cyrila a Metoda v Trnave, Filozofická fakulta, Trnava 2010. ISBN 978-80-8105-191-3. 275 pp. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2011) (1): Literatura v souvislostech. Několik příběhů o tom, jak také číst literaturu z širšího pohledu. Nakladatelství Vlastimil Johanus, České Budějovice 2011, 151 pp., ISBN 978-80-87510-04-9. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2011) (2): Významová disperznost pojmu „romantismus“ jako klíč k jeho podstatě. In: Literárny romantizmus. Eds: Miloš Zelenka, Zuzana Vargová. Fakulta stredoeurópskych štúdií UKF v Nitre, Katedra areálových kultúr, Nitra 2011, pp. 9-23. ISBN 978-80-8094-425-4. POSPÍŠIL, I.: (2002): Postmodernistický romantismus Oxany Zabužko v románu Terénní průzkum ukrajinského sexu. In: Slovanský romantismus – Poetika romantična v slovanských literaturách. Banská Bystrica 2002, pp. 127-137. POSPÍŠIL, I. (2009 2): The Permanent Crisis, Or Can, Could or Should Comparative Literary Studies Survive? Between History, Theory and Area Studies. World Literature Studies, vol. 1(18) 2009, s. 50-61. ISSN 1337-9690, ISSN 1337-9275. POSPÍŠIL, I.: (2004): Studie o literárních směrech a žánrech. Katedra slovanských jazykov, Filologická fakulta, Univerzita Mateja Bela, Banská Bystrica 2004, 122 pp., ISBN 80-8055-965-1. POSPÍŠIL, I.: Tvar a funkce metarománu. Světová literatura 1984, č. 3, pp. 251-253. Romantismus v české a polské literatuře. Slezská univerzita, Opava 2000, ISBN 8072480782. Romantizmus reflektujúci a reflektovaný. Katedra ruského jazyka a literatúry Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenského, Bratislava 1997. Romantyzm. Wydawca i redaktor Sławomir Żurawski. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa 2008. ROTREKL, Z. (1995) : Barokní fenomén v současnosti. TORST, Praha 1995. Rozkošný hrob: antologie české romantické poezie. Sestavil Václav Vaněk a kol. Pistorius & Olšanská, Příbram 2009. SIMPSON, M. (1986): The Russian Gothic Novel and Its British Antecedents. Columbus 1986. SIPOVSKIJ, V. V. (1899): Н. М. Карамзин‚ автор «Писeм русского путeшeствeнника». Санкт-Пeтeрбург 1899. SIPOVSKIJ, V. V. (1909-1910): Очeрки истории русского романа I-II. Санкт-Пeтeрбург 1909-1910. SIWICKA, D. (1999): Romantyzm 1822-1863. PWN, Warszawa 1999. Slovanský romantismus – estetično genologických kategórií. Katedra slovanských jazyků Filologické fakukty UMB, Banská Bystrica 2003. Slovanský romantizmus – o žánrovosti. Katedra slovanských jazykov Filologickej fakulty Univerzity Mateja Bela, Banská Bystrica 2002. Slovanský romantizmus – obraz človeka v slovanskom romantizme. Katedra slovanských jazykov, Filologická fakulta Univerzity Mateja Bela, Banská Bystrica 2005. Slovanský romantizmus v európskych súvislostiach. Katedra slovanských jazykov FiF UMB, Banská Bystrica 2006. Slovanský romantizmus. Filologická fakulta Univerzity Mateja Bela, Banská Bystrica 1999. Slovanský romantizmus. O poetike. Filologická fakulta Univerzity Mateja Bela, Banská Bystrica 2000. Slovanský romantizmus. Poetika romantična. Filologická fakulta Univerzity Mateja Bela, Banská Bystrica 2002. Slovenskí romantici: próza (vybral, zostavil, úvodnú štúdiu, edičnú poznámku, bibliografiu a poznámky o autoroch napísal Cyril Kraus). Tatran, Bratislava 2002. Smích a běs. Praha 1988. SMIRNOV, I. P. (1977): Художественный смысл и эволюция поэтических систем. Москва 1977. SMIRNOV, I. P. (1981): Диахронические трансформации литературных жанров и мотивов. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 4, Wien 1981. STRIEDTER, J. (1961): Der Schelmenroman in Russland: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des russischen Romans vor Gogol’. Berlin und Wiesbaden 1961. SZYJKOWSKI, M. (1946): Polská účast v českém národním obrození. 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Svoboda‘s Prose and Its International Context Literary development isn’t determined by its artistic peaks omly, but also and rather by the power of creative impulses in which an artistic culmination, generally recognized and acknowledged by critics, need not be the most significant. The end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century does represent a revolutionary period in the whole world literature and it also manifested itself vividly in Czech literature. Especially in prose, as well as in anywhere else, there is a conflict between existing traditional structures which characterized previous, mainly realist poetics contaminated only to some extent by new modernist streaming and by fundamental feelings of the period, including anxiety and subsequent neurasthenic conditions and faltering as their basic result. František Xaver Svoboda (25. 10. 1860 Mníšek pod Brdy – 25. 5. 1943 Prague) is usually described in encyclopedias as a realist poet, prose writer and dramatist. There is no need to pay much attention to his biography, though it seems to be interesting; perhaps it will be enough to notice that his life and other writers’ careers of that period were as like as two peas: his father was an owner of a little property, had carbon and wood business; then there was a seven-year natural science school and unfinished technical school; further, there was a civil servant career. His literary ambitions were largely realized in contemporary magazines Lumír, Zlatá Praha, Zvon, Osvěta and others. He started his activity in the 1880s as a poet (Básně, Poems,1883, 1885; Nálady z minulých let, Moods of Former Years, 1890; V našem vzduchu, In Our Air, 1890). His feelings of disillusionment of the development of Czech society resembled prevalent moods of his epoch presented by the young generation of rebels, such as Viktor Dyk, Josef Svatopluk Machar and others. Sometimes F. X. Svoboda is considered to be a typical representative of the Czech fin de siècle as if his creative activity had been stopped before 1914, but it isn’t true. There is no doubt that it was typical and characteristic of him that his prose writings seem rathte to disintegrate the achived level of poetics, he passes from global pessimism to situational comicality and light stories and also dramatic ones: it is not by chance that his little artefacts have become a rewarding part of Czech cinema (Čekanky, Ladies in Waiting, 1940, Poslední mohykán, Last of the Mohicans, 1947); his 150^th anniversary on 25^th October 2010 attracted only little attention[17]. The author of the quoted article notify that on 16^th October in the old monastery in Skalka nad Mníškem pod Brdy a ceremonial opening was organized and was visited by Svoboda’s step-grandson and step-granddaughter – Ivan Lichtág and Monika Lichtágová. The author explains such a lack of popularity by the fact that he wrote about the themes which were not favoured in the so-called Communist period[18]. His wife Růžena Svobodová (née Čápová, 10th July 1868, Mikulovice u Znojma, - 1st January 1920 Prague, get married 1890) is more likely to be remembered up to this day – and also thanks to F. X. Šalda. She is an author of lyricising prose, e. g. Ztroskotáno (1896, Wrecked), Přetížený klas (1896, An Ovevladen Ear of Corn), Zamotaná vlákna (1899, Implicated Threads), Milenky (1902, Mistresses) and the most often re-edited of them - Černí myslivci (1908, Black Hunters) though her later prose works, such as Ráj (1920, Paradise) and Hrdinné a bezpomocné dětství (1920, Heroic and Helpless Childhood) are also highly appreciated. There are some other reasons, too, because even nowadays the attitude towards his literary output has not been clearly defined; maybe it’s because this writer wasn’t “pampered” even by his contemporary critics (often deservedly so), and some of his works belong rather to mass literary production though there isn’t lack of humor and intelligence in them. F. X. Svoboda didn’t manage to give up his idyllic, melancholical-nostalgic and sentimental loci communes and didn’t even want to; he was reproached with it especially by avant-garde critics who had never understood that it was a quintessence of the Czech 19^th –century revival tradition. The Czech literature, as well as the whole Central-European literature, was often returning to preromantic literary structures: how many times a sentimentalist model was already returning in the epoch when rough realism and naturalism dominated everywhere in the world and the revivalist didactics never ceased to exist even in decadent literature[19]. After all, the destiny of the Czech 19^th-century novel which began to assert itself quite slowly is also a proof. In the Czech National Library catalogues Svoboda’s works are presented by more than 250 items, and this fact could be a motive for the question how his books’ quantity related to their quality: F. X. Svoboda was yet a representative of a period which appreciated literature deeply and probably even overestimated it; literature was a source of income not only for eminent masters, but also for ordinary writers, and F. X. S. with at least some part of his output belonged to the writers of higher aesthetic quality. Although Svoboda’s literary output has its lights and not only shadows this reflection of his two earlier novels is considered to be basic, also because their form expresses a kind of a traditional compromise between the novel chronicle regressive morphology and psychological introspection; at the same time it is filled with modernist sensibility, but also contains the padding of revivalist tasks. A vivid aesthetic effect of these texts is obviously weakened, but it nevertheless created a composition which didn’t deny its correlation to the fashionable tendencies of French and Russian literature, but at the same time had an effect of something new and inspiring – and this was underestimated by critics both of that period and nowadays. It is all the more evident because the main feeling of accruing anxiety in the face of an approaching storm reflected so many times in the arts and transformed to faltering, is something distinctive of today’s literature which has found itself in an important turning period and has become embarrassed, too, as well as an inevitable sense of a coming tremor. That’s why, just like F. X. Svoboda himself, it keeps searching for a reliable anchorage. The Czech literature of the 19^th and partly of the 20^th century is notable for its mixture of currents, styles and genres, and the same applies to some other literatures of Slavonic and Central European area. On the one hand, there is a natural, though sometimes artificial, bridge between the West and the East, the North and the South and, on the other, certain incommunicativeness or even isolation and aloofness within the limits of its own dimensions and traditions, as well as a kind of a loner character. On the one hand, there is a call for world-wide character, on the other an emphasis on the own singularity “against everybody” and „between the streams”. That was also the reason why Czech literature, as well as some other Slavonic and Central European literatures, found itself in a special position and was overtaken by Russian literature which had produced its “miracle” as early as the 19^th century; in other words, in its romantic and realist “Golden Age”. The phenomenon I usually call “prae-post effect” or “prae-post paradox”[20] caused acute transformation after the adoption of foreign models and also a “jump” over one of the stages of development (or even more than one) in the direction of an amorphous and specific form perceived as “madness” (War and Peace, Dostoyevsky’s novels, ex post Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol, and then “western” Turgenev, to a lesser degree). The Czech literature of the second half of the 19^th century extensively used French, English and Russian models which can be seen in a number of translations and in the changes in poetry, prose and drama. In prose this shift is even more admirable because various tendencies are welded together in it; and also because Czech literature as a tool and a product of these changing scales had to carry a burden of the developing national life’s tasks, but at the same time it tried to get rid of these tasks and to become more relevant from the aesthetic point of view. It concerns especially Svoboda’ two chronicles, as they are sometimes called not too exactly – Rozkvět (1898, The Florescence) and Řeka (The River, 1903-1905). A variety of thought and concrete philosophical impulses of that period (including Zola’s naturalism, evolutionism, positivist orientations on biology observable in the generational classification of works of literature and also in Nietzschean philosophy and all-pervading eroticism and sexuality which are the main signs of modern lifestyle) are coupled here with traditionalist-realist fracture of consecutive action structure where unrestrained Czech national life’s development interferes along with the growth of the class of entrepreneurs with flowing between country and town which is more typical of the Czech society than of any other Slavonic literature, with intellectual preciosity and a cult of a love game and flirtation, with those “superman phenomena” which could be noticed in Lermontov’s work already in the form of a manipulative demon strategy adopting demon models of the 18^th and the 19^th century and moving from a game to life philosophy and compromise, under which a desire for new truthfulness and primary naivety can be seen. Both the second half of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^st century in the genre of the novel found themselves under the impact of natural sciences in the sense of positivism and evolutionism, but they were also under the impact of life philosophy and the awakening of sexuality as a dominant theme in literature: this was, strictly speaking, the beginning of forming philosophical trends connected with sensualism and vitalism which captivated literature at the turn of the 1910s and the 1920s. Although it is impossible to deny their connection with English background and their French followers who were outstanding in the sphere of political theory nevertheless there was a new psychological orientation in Geisteswissenschaften which had an influence, for example, on the poetics of titles. F. X. Svoboda himself as a poet, prose writer and dramatist, had a majority of such titles: in Básně (1883, 1885, Poems) there are parts called Paprsky (Rays), Drobné zrní (Tiny Grains), Chladem a teplem (Through Cold and Warmth), Širokým proudem) (Along the Wide Stream) and some other. Impressionistic character and inconstancy of his poetry (Nálady minulých let, V našem vzduchu) are based on the connection of mind, nature, and climate in particular. This love of “nature” titles also showed itself in other collections of poems, such as Květy mých lučin (Blossoms of My Meadows) and K žatvě dozrálo (Ripen for Harvest). The physical, mental and natural states and situations are often being repeated in the titles like Awakening, Young Ideas, Changeable Stories, Mixture of Fun and Grief, Fascinating Women’s Heads, Passion and Fate, Cloudlets of Youth or Quiet Exaltation (Probuzení, Mladé představy, Náladové povídky, Směs žertu a žalu, Vzrušující hlavy ženské, Vášeň a osud, Obláčky mládí nebo Tiché povznesení). The admiration of streaming life and its cmplicated shaping can be noticed in Směry života (1982, The Ways of Life) and Rozklad (1889, Breakup). The beginning of the 20^th century in European literatures, and in Slavonic literatures in particular, is distinguished by its novel and family chronicles[21]. Right here this vegetative poetry in titles occurs as a key to genre and poetics. In Czech and other novel chronicles some biological motifs are being repeated by way of leitmotifs, like, for example, a motif of bees in Jirásek’s chronicle U nás, In Our Place, 1903) and Holeček’s chronicle novel Naši (12 books, 1897-1930, Our People); Knut Hamsun’s novel Markens Grøde (1917) is also closely connected with the country life; S. T. Aksakov in his chronicles represents a motif of the child and its cult (Семейная хроника, 1856‚ A Family Chronické; Детские годы Багрова-внука, 1858, Childhood Years of the Bagrov Grandson); the cult of the land and of the countryside can be mentioned in the Mrštík brothers’ chronicle Rok na vsi. Kronika moravské dědiny (1903-1904, The Village Year). Four volumes of Jirásek’s chronicle U nás are called Úhor, Novina, Osetek a Zeměžluč (The Fallow Land, The Virgin Soil, The Sown Land, The Centaury) and in the Mrštík brothers’ Rok na vsi we can see the cycle of agricultural work and of nature’s rules; biological determinants as titles are also used in the Russian novel chronicles of S. T. Aksakov, in M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel The Golovlev Family (Gospoda Golovlevy, 1880); the book Пошехонская старина (1887-89, Old Life in Poshekhona) by the same author also has some patrimonial characteristics; this also can be said about several German and English chronicles; the analogical part of Josef Holeček’s South Bohemian family chronicle Naši is called How They Live and Die (Jak u nás žijou a umírají); Svetozár Hurban Vajanský also has similar motifs (Podrost, 1881, The Underbrush, Babie leto, 1882, Indian Summer, Búrka v zátiší, 1882, Storm in Retreat, Suchá ratolesť, 1884, A Dry Tajg, Jarný mráz, 1891, Spring Frost, Pustokvet, 1893, A Barren Flower, Koreň a výhonky, 1895-1896, The Root and Outgrowths), thus his works strikingly resemble Leskov’s chronicles (1831-1895)[22]. While studying descriptive genre formations we often see the antinomy “the old – the new”. This antinomy usually appears side by side with antinomies of a similar orientation, such as “home – world” and “nature – culture”. Such opposites are evidently connected with romantic imagination and idyllic and melancholic perception of the world. They initially had unambiguous axiological orientation in the sense that “the old”, “nature” and “home” created a hiugly appreciated semantic chain opposed by “the new”, “culture” and “world”; later such a model of axiological polarization was inverted. This development can be proved, for example, by S. T. Aksakov and N. S. Leskov and their inverted forms in the chronicles by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin or M. Gorky. The position of “old days” is not equally intensive in different national literatures. The Russian literature is particularly pervaded by various reappearances, reminiscences and reflections. The more vigorously Peter the Great's utilitarian reforms were implemented especially in the 18th and the 19th centuries, the stronger the desire for the past was manifested. The division of Russian culture into utilitarian and non-utilitarian can be personified by the figures of M. Lomonosov and A. Sumarokov: on the one hand, there is the author of a didactic poem A Letter about the Use of Glass (Письмо о пользе стекла) and‚ on the other hand‚ there are upholders of wisdom sovereignty and of non-utlitarian attitude towards the world who referred to the Bible’s Ecclesiastes. The problem of “old days” arises in Russian literature out of dualism as one of the antinomies, such as “The East – The West”, “paganism – Christianity” or “Russia – Europe”. The “old days” phenomenon was closely connected with the defence of natural origins and with the atmosphere of peace and serenity in the literature of so-called static genres, descriptions, sketches and essays or chronicles, where a plot unfolds in a certain place which is opposed to “the wide world”. The “old days” theme is not typical only of a certain movement in Russian literature, but also of some layers of all Slavonic literatures, especially in the 19^th century and at the beginning of the 20^th century. The reasons can be found in the social development of these nations, as well as in the emphasis of enclave values of national life and culture in interference with other national entities. The Slavs’ „return to the past” was mainly caused by the necessity of defending the national uniqueness and political independence or fighting for their revitalization. The Russians defending their empire which appeared as a European and world superpower among other mighty political alignments also worship and idolize their past, their patriarchal lifestyle (“Русь”, “старая сказка” and others) opposed to industrialization and Europeanism which have been connected with capitalisт expansion. Thus, on the one hand we encounter the “old days” idealization (S. T. Aksakov, N. S. Leskov), and on the other we notice their criticism (M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin). In other Slavonic literatures the “old days” phenomenon occurs in different national, social, ethical and aesthetic contexts of poetics which has been presented by traditional (realism) and newer literary trends (modernism, avant-garde). The history of literature manifested several genres that still keep their own stability and consistent character and do not renounce their substantial formal basis. One of them is the genre of the chronicle (see above) [23]. We refer to a voluminous material that can be regarded from different points of view. In our study, we have substantiated on the example of several national literatures that the mover of this literary form is usually an actual conflict of genres and its methods: the tension between them can also be defused if the genre and the method coexist in contrasting interconnection. On this basis we have created a chronicle typology as a complex of four forms (chronicle, novelized chronicle, and novel chronicle and chronicalized novel) [24]. And at the same time a certain semantic nucleus has been preserved; a recipient always recognizes this semantic basis; therefore he can see developmental genre continuity. These above-mentioned types of the chronicle differ from each other, but they have common world view architectonics, namely the basic dynamic, constructive model containing an established corpus of substantial formal determinants. The key to a somewhat displaced view of the “eternity” of genres is probably in its name itself (“chronos” = time). Sometimes the function of time in the chronicle can be observed a simplistic way as a successive narration of events (chronological sequence); nevertheless some genre specimens’ analysis shows that it is not the only significance of time. In our book Ruská románová kronika Bakhtin’s chronotope is considered to be a genre dominant: 1. The chronicle space pulses between the “micro-space” and the “big world”. 2. The chronicle space is characterized by the motif of permanent return. 3. The chronicle time is characterized by the conception of the one time series. 4. The chronicle time is retarded by various literary devices. 5. The chronicle time is connected with perceptible contradiction of the past and the present [25]. The temporal “resignation” or the finding of something like “timelessness” is the next constructive trait of a genre. One of the invariable devices of timelessness is the space in the idyll where pitiless laws of time seem to be invalid. Timelessness is closely connected with aforementioned space pulsation: relative isolation of locality creates an area where the time immobility dominates, because the idyll state appears by achieving the ideal. However, the difference between “timeless” space and the “big world” produces a natural tension being lessened by a variety of conflicts and collisions. The discord between immobile and idyllic on the one hand and historical on the other is the next demonstration of the chronicle time ambivalence. F. X. Svoboda inclines towards the novel chronicle’s genre construction, but as for his aforementioned novels written at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centurieshe rather develops its plan in the sense of biological sequence: the child’s and the descendant’s role as the key is connected with the current which has affected the aesthetic heyday of European literatures (Knut Hamsun). Thus, his formation exists within the framework of the chronicle tradition, as it had been described before, but at the same time it struggles for “biologizing” and psychological introspection which is in sharp contradiction to a classical chronicle: however, its modes of narration show that even here he rather adheres to traditional techniques, namely to an omniscient narrator, or a narrator-witness: thus, he follows the footsteps of more or less traditionalistic realist narrative tradition (see, for example, how even such an extreme Romanticist like M. Y. Lermontov works in another way with the narrative strategy in his “novel in novellas“ A Hero of Our Time (Герой нашего времени, 1841). In such a way F. X. Svoboda develops a certain vagueness of Czech literature’s poetics, its “miscellaneous” character (it may also refer to rather peculiar Czech Romanticism – with some exceptions to the rule, such as K. H. Mácha: in quite a number of cases it was externally romantic and internally anti-romantic[26]; nearly the same can be said about Czech Realism often growing from sentimentalism – J. K. Tyl, B. Němcová). On the whole, the definite programmes of, for example, French, English and partly Spanish literature, are opposite to a less definite form of national literature; it is not by chance that J. W. Goethe created the concept of Erziehungsroman and Bildungsroman and tried to fill it with his own works in an effort to catch up with West-European literatures though there are also different opinions of this problem[27]. From this point of view, some other literatures, including Italian (which is moving little by little from the area of Western Europe to Central Europe, mainly because a considerable part of its cultural potential has belonged to the Habsburg monarchy for a long time; that’s why the definition “Ostmitteleuropa” which is felt to be pejorative along with absence of the concept “Westmitteleuropa”, is methodologically inconsistent[28]). The Polish literature also tried to get out of Central European indeterminateness through its orientation on French and later, seemingly surprisingly, Russian literature - that of the second half of the 19^th century in particular (distinctness of Polish Romanticism and Positivism/Realism). After all, the relations between Russian and Polish literatures and their mutual transfer and meditation of aesthetic and poetological values deserve a special attention.[29]. By the way, by means of West Rus’ (today’s Ukraine) and Byelorussia (Belaruś) Russia had an opportunity to get universal European texts, such as Gesta Romanorum (Римские деяния) or Speculum Magnum (Великое Зерцало); in the 18^th century (and even earlier, in the first third of the 17^th century) because of the Russian leap to Europe Russia ceased to be interested in Central Europe – this situation still survives. Russia tended towards Western Europe and USA; today it also tends to Asia: the most significant events were a defeat of the Thirty Year War’s winner - Sweden - in the Battle of Poltava (1709), then the destruction of Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812 and also Russian Cossacks in France (1814); some time before there was coquetry with Russian Indian expansion (the symbolic Cossack division, sent by Paul I at the end of the 18^th century from Orenburg against India, has not reached its destination because of Paul assassination); nowadays the Russian nationalists began to dream of India again (after the fall of the Byzantine Empire many texts about various world empires began to appear in Muscovy: The Tale of the Babylon Empire Babel, The Tale of the Indian Empire/Of the Rich India and others. hegumen Philotheus formulated his idea of Moscow being the third and the last Rome; during the First World War, after the conquest of Ístanbul/Constantinoples, the Orthodox Church wanted to make Constantine’s City a capital of the whole Russian Empire; F. I. Tyutchev in the poem The Russian Geography/(Русская география sees the Russian Empire boundaries between the Ganges, the Nile a the Elbe). Russian literature gravitates towards the West-European area while modern Ukrainian and Byelorussian literatures (as well as Central Europe) which have been established not so long ago, have their own specific poetological pattern. The situation has changed in the 20^th century as a consequence of modern trends - modernism and avant-garde -, but even here Russian literature has occupied a leading position, perhaps along with France, Britain and the USA (the famous phenomena of Russian symbolism, futurism, and the originality of acmeism, imagism, constructivism, Russian analogue of surrealism – OBERIU and so on) [30]. At the turn of the 19^th century F. X. Svoboda creates the works that have their Czech and international contexts: first, their psychologization inspired by Geisteswissenchaft of that time and sometimes connected with psychologically oriented linguistics, a predecessor of American psycholinguistics of the 20^th century (A. A. / O. O. Potebnya[31]); further, they have retrograde forms of the novel chronicle as we wrote about in the context of biological and vegetal motifs and nostalgic-ironic “old days”, e. g. in the works of N. S. Leskov, Svetozár Hurban Vajanský and Vladislav Vančura[32]. The common denominator of these poetological conceptions is an offer of an alternative to the technological pattern of general development. From this point of view, Svoboda’s output is to some extent one of many other crossroads which were created by the “fin de siècle“ when European cultures returned to their own archetypes and to the confrontation with the revolutionary development (the 18^th century of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, “historical novel”, “Gothic novel”, Sturm und Drang, the 19^th century: positivism/realism versus neoromanticism, modernism, the 20^th century: the fall of communism as an extreme flashing-point of the enlightened demiurgic pattern, the strengthening of magic, mythologic, and religious cults, N. Berdyaev’s “the new Middle Age”, “брожение” – wandering, roaming and mass migration)[33]. This migration chain ас а connecting link is presented not only by economic migration, but also students reminding of goliards as they roam around the world within various European programmes with present-day lingua franca – English; they are markedly cosmopolitan and generate multinational consciousness and the net of opinions which has quiete an influential background. The gradual deconstruction of national states is taking place, and it also relates to national literatures; however, globalization leads up to new strengthening of individualism and isolationism. At the end of the Middle Ages, on the contrary, there were partialization and the rise of national states; two industrial revolutions led up not only to a rise of financial capital, but also to the struggle for new markets and to new nationalisms. Today, we observe similar convergent and divergent processes. Certainly, we could not speak about the whole Svoboda’s literary output from this standpoint, but only about its nucleus, for he belonged to the generation of Czech literature which was on the verge and on the brink of modernism and realism. Czech literature at that time was solving European and world problems in its own way, and sometimes it was more didactic than aesthetic. This is the next proof of a successful completion of ideological-aesthetic processes which began as early as the end of the 18^th century and continued through several stages in the course of the whole 19^th century. The importance of the erotic theme which becomes stronger during the development of realism and naturalism, then culminates right in modernism and is accompanied by the search for new correlation between the physical and the emotional. In Svoboda’s novels this subject is expressed as a flirtation and postponing of physical intimacy because of the fear of pregnancy. The situation we face today is quite different: there is the so-called women’s “pill liberation”, but, at the same time, there is often the fear of legal relationship complications, the significance of contactless relations and the virtual computer eroticism. Svoboda’s works are significant mainly as a collision of etiquette, ethics, and aesthetics of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, and second, as a villagers’ penetrating into cities – that was the fundamental symptom of the Czech National Revival success, as it is described in the chronicle Rozkvět (1898, The Florescence). At that time, just like today, it was a matter of economic political power and appearance of a new technological human type (in the novel Rozkvět there is a man with a symptomatic name Antonín Novák), maybe rather a skilful calculator that had turned from an uneducated, but talented wage-earner into a businessman and speculator, but still preserved his original national mentality. The next generation builds its educational superstructure on the very basis and often renounces opinions of its grandfathers and fathers; this is represented in M. Gorky’s novel The Artamonov Business (Дело Артамновоых, 1925). The genre tendency towards heterogeneity in Svoboda’s novels is expressed in the renewed presence of romantic techniques which, however, acquire new romantic, decorative and etiquette form: “Vilém Řetovský was a twenty-six-year-old, perfectly handsome man, tall, slim, and neatly dressed who had become vain because of great women’s favour and his mother’s admiration and whom all women were, popularly speaking, stuck on. He was interesting, for he was adventurous. The girls who knew him from the salons of Prague bourgeoisie became in the meantime young bored rich ladies and invited him to their amusements. Now he was playing another role and was plesed to come. His head reminded much of good-looking men from the times of Byron and Pushkin, or maybe even of the poets themselves. He had pink skin, round black eyes, curly dark hair, side-whiskers and a little moustache without sharp tips around his big, narrow scarlet lips” [34]. The key place in Svoboda’s novels belongs to Prague as an emblem of modern, rapidly growing city, but also as a national emblem; Prague is depicted realistically, impressionistically and in decorative style influnced by the New Art’s (Secession) poetics: “She went round the corner to the street with several houses. One could see Hradčany and a part of Nové Město from there. Prague was covered with light violet mist. Milada thought, that she was too late, so she hurried up to the skating rink constructed on a big building square between two houses. Outside the awkward fence heaps of heads showed black and vivacious babble of young people poured into the air. Milada put on speed and, with rosy cheeks, as if she placed a big bet, with her skates, directed her steps towards the entry. Two swarthy men in winter coats patched all over, with scarves around their necks and on heads, were shifting from foot to foot in high shoes on the pavement in front of the gate. Milada looked at her light jacket with its strands of wool alternated with brown curled hair here and there; after having paid one of the men entrance fee, she came rushing into the skating rink” [35]. The same may be said of the key moments of the plot: “Approximately in a week, in February already, they met together in the afternoon in Letná Street to have a talk; it was a bright and slightly frosty day, when everything was festively white with morning snow. Both were looking forward to that meeting. The air was pleasant, quiet and purely violet in the distance, so all things looked like from a fairy tale. In that clear air Prague was gently lighted by the setting sun and riveted both men’s eyes on its snow-covered roofs, its dark walls and towers, its rising cathedrals, and Žižkov and Vinohrady disappearing over the coloured horizon. Jindřich had a special festive mood in his soul, when he was looking at darkened bridges with massive pillars deep in the frozen river harmonized with the architecture of Staré Město and Malá Strana, and he felt marvellously happy in his heart to be Czech” [36]. Svoboda often has Russian allusions: memories of Russian environment and mainly allusions on Russian books (Turgenev, Dostoyevsky), for example, Dostoyevsky’s famous statement about necessity of suffering: “I wish a little bit of grief for every youth, because sorrow is the best moisture for soul and heart development” [37]. There is also a frequent specific return to pre-romantic verbal structures, primarily to sentimentalism with its cult of sensitivity and also of emotional and somatic faltering, physical and social mutilation, mental and physical collapse. This is the apotheosis of personality complexity and branching, including a weak, subverted personality that tries to find its identity and new resurgent values and ways and often returns to nature in an effort to summon up fresh energy there. Hana Pechanová and Vilém try this (lovemaking in the nature), but they are so constrained by social contextures with their surroundings that their relationship broke down. It is no mere chance that these scenes of a woman’s biological awakening distantly remind us of D. H. Lawrence with his Lady Chatterley's Lover: here the biological awakening is still very literary, emotional and heartfelt, while Lawrence shows provocation and even vulgarity. Erotic inspiration often has a literary basis (Milada reads I. S. Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring). Milada’s mental disease breaks out soon after a breakup with her beloved, and this is rather a non-continuation of an incipient relationship, this is the fruitage of her indecision and of not knowing what she wants; the chaplain’s character has a religiously erotic, provocative subtext, as it was quite common in modernism. Dreams, hard states of mind, attacks of nerves are only the modernist accumulation of everything that already appeared in temperate version in pre-romantic and sentimentalist poetics in the 18^th century, and in Czech literature more likely in the 19^th century. Sentimentalist eroticism is also grounded in a literary style here: against the backdrop there is a skating rink, sceneries of Prague, the Vltava, the Old Town and modern parts of the city; in the middle of the lively large-scale building the author let other sounds be heard: this is a resonance of The Song of Songs when Hana Pechanová enchanted by Vilém searches for her man like in that Hebraic amorous lyrics: “Her heart was beating with some glorious emotion. She walked into her room and stood there until Pechan calmed down in a big hall, where Ann had brought him supper. Then went out quietly again and ran quickly downstairs towards oaklets where everything was silent. She searched, whispered in ecstasy, sought, but nobody was there. Only somewhere in the forest towards T. she heard something like an unclear singing of an unknown song. Her soul was filled with strange and unusual power. Her eyes saw human figures standing coldly in all the bushes. She ran upstairs and quickly entered her room. There she lay down near the window, and roving eyes were looking for something in the night. Vondráček’s voice and yelping dogs were heard from the ground-floor. “He was there, searching for me, desiring me” she whispered suddenly desperately “while I was walking down the road in vain”. She covered eyes with her hands and began to tremble” [38]. Love and hate, odi et amo and Haßliebe walk hand in hand[39]. Sentimentalist-romantic introspection absorbs the significant parts of the novel Řeka (1903-1905, The River), for example, in the situation of Milada’s breakup with Jaroslav[40]. In Rozkvět and Řeka human life and its manifestation are interrelated not only with the nature, but also with cultural acts, reading, Russian allusive inspiration (“Already the next day he came upstairs to them to the second floor and was sitting there for a whole hour. They were amusing themselves very sincerely. Milada was serving tea to guests in small Japanese cups. Her wide betrothal ring was noticeably sparkling. Štěpánek was thinking all the time, how he could find an opportunity to play the zither, but still had no luck. He was quite sure, that his playing would go so well with today’s mood, and so, after not finding the right moment, he got really upset. His dry, white fingers were trembling nervously. “That would be fascinating!” he thought impatiently, while Pechan was telling about a merry merchants’ meeting in a small village near Moscow, and that seemed to be never ending and was highly amusing for Milada”[41]), and also with the unmentioned topos of Prague, which appears as a emblem in the most important moments: “He walked through Prague and directed his steps along the bridge to Letná. He wished to meet Jindřich there. The river was noisy. Lots of carriages and horse-drawn trams, entirely crowded, were driving to Prague. Coaches’ whistling was breaking through the noise. Thousands of people flocked from Královská Preserve. Vilém looked at his watch”. [42] Or in another passage: “There was an evening concert of a military band in the main restaurant. When Vilém was walking along the road coming from the Emperor's Mill, he heard a wedding march from Lohengrin among the quiet trees. Music augmented by plenty of resonances among groups of trees sounded touchingly and tunefully. Vilém was listening involuntarily to it and echoed several times. It seemed to him, that there was something close to his melancholy passion in that music, and he was soaking it up as a consolation. So, he found himself at a wide promenade in front of a restaurant illuminated by the light and colored by attires of a society having fun. A large number of people were strolling along the path near the music pavilion. Little, agile and skittish saleswomen from the shops, one and all in light many-colored blouses, girls from Holešov factories and the demimondaines came running there and soon the passing society was marked with their sign. The nobility and bourgeois ladies left or sat down at the tables. More serious ladies disappeared from the promenade, too. Only officers, dandies and students remained there. The day society turned into the evening one” [43]. Prague is an important dynamic factor and a reflection of human living, and this is a typical attribute of sentimentalism and the following romanticism: “He sat down in a restaurant in Letná Street and took a supper. There were only several guests at the next tables. There were colonel with a lady and two children, and a scraggy Jew with a little daughter, who was constantly writing something down and was looking at Vilém with her black eyes from time to time. He thought that she was laughing at him and whispering about him with his skinny father. He turned away and was peering into dark Prague covered with whitish mist, which looked as if it grew up from the wide depth. All the towers and houses seemed strange and huge to him. “O Lord, what will happen to Hana? What is awaiting me? What will be with my child?...” [44]. Of course, as well as empathy, there is sensitivity to surroundings and human destiny: “Vilém remembered that there was a gin mill, in front of which several ragged vagrants always stood there staring and ratiocinating. At the time he was on good terms with his friend, a student, he would prefer to avoid such gin mills, but today, after he had turned away from that orating drunkard, who at that moment was narrating to a stunned little girl, how King Charles had arranged a university for the Czechs, he proceeded right to the Mariánské Square, where about ten men were droning, mostly drunk. He passed them by very closely and noticed their sickly look, and a new tide of intense sympathy overflowed his soul. The noise, people’s laugh and shouts were flying out the gin mill open doors. The black seller’s cap and wide rims of tuns and casks came into his view. A sort of a song, unknown and without any deeper meaning resounded from the fusty air of the gin mill” [45]. Svoboda’ people are impressible and capable of empathy, that’s why they suffer and try to hold away the direct contact with life and all its risks by their suffering. Svoboda’s characters, although they make love physically, manifest themselves as eternal virgins, or at least want to be virgins as long as possible rather in the mental sense, because of fear of wounding, passing off and being abandoned. The lack of the direct physical contact lengthens their delight in searching, wandering, fears and parting – these are also important points of experiencing a feeling. In Rozkvět where the business growth of the Novaks, originally woodworking and carter village family, is retraced, the sensitiveness is a quality, which via facti indicates human maturing: the dynasty's progenitor must yet mature for this from his simplicity and mechanicalness; business is prospering, so now he has more time to penetrate below the surface of things, closer to the essence of a society and of the human psyche, and becomes more sensitive: his children already have this quality as a self-evident heritage gift; then, an accompanying point of empathy is sorrow for human life and the nation’s destiny[46]. Svoboda’s novels of the first wave reflect the Czech society in the stage of modernization, on the path from the national revival and its results to the new, industrial, cosmopolitan and capitalist time bringing new problems. And especially a duel that isn’t finished yet: it is the duel between a complicated human character which is rather aggravating for life, but at the same time manages to perceive the world in its lights and shadows and consequently (thanks to its complexity) comprehend it better and more deeply, react to its impulses and find a “tender” and not fierce solution, in other words, a solution for an individual and for society – and a simple, pragmatic, teleologically oriented product of the epoch of efficiency and profit cult; one would think that such a person narrowly directed at the only target, must be not only successful, but also capable of solving any human and social problems: nevertheless, it’s a big error. Yuri Olesha, a Russian writer, a Pole by birth, has once shown the same on the basis of another material, in another period and in another environment, namely in his novel Envy (Зависть, 1927): a successful pork butcher is matched against an unsuccessful poet, a physically strong optimist with perfect digestion versus a neurasthenic poet who, whether he likes it or not, unites the past and the present, and, thus, the future; constancy and unsteadiness of the future are based right on his “tenderness”, impracticalness. Generally speaking, in the 19th century, approximately at the same time two European were published, and they are typical of this epoch. Karl Marx wrote his Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts (1844, first time published in Russian, 1927) with a passage about alienated labour; in Russia the Ruriks’ descendant Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky published his prose The Russian Nights (1842, Русские ночи) where he discusses similar themes in quasi backward Russia separated from the quasi enlightened West by a blank wall of autocracy that already began to crack. After them comes the biological existential situation in Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915) and its analogue in Hašek’s Švejk – both of these works are fruitage of their time; both of them reflect the faltering time similarly, but still differently. It would seem, that the faltering, which F. X. Svoboda’s characters suffer from, and which they remind so much, is a negative and destructive element, but it is a simulator like a fantastic/magical fairy tale in human’s life – warning and calling to pay attention, but also promising a happy ending, and, above all, offering a way out and a new development opportunity (this reminds of famous Dostoevsky’s epilogues in which a better alternative and a new start like in Christianity are offered). Restlessness and faltering are primarily peculiar for a person who defends himself with the help of these feelings against hostile world’s blows; they force him to learn to withstand it and to win something that enables a better life. This faltering is actually a prolific way to understanding and certainty. Such a widely conceived and virtually sensitive, empathic person disappears from today’s literature and relinquishes place to economocracy and the cult of soulless efficiency. This leads mainly – paradoxically in the epoch of the information explosion and Internet – to the loss of understanding of correlations and interconnections, to disorientation in time and place: today’s people lack spatial value orientation and permanently look for new protection, Internet is a phenomenon that multiplies the faltering, right because it is not fixed in any connection; it interacts with everything and with nothing; a man falls into it like into infinity; however, he cannot grasp this idea, because it reminds him too much of the idea of eternity and death. F. X. Svoboda’s early novels which are situated at the crossroads of literary currents, in a mould of a number of poetic techniques, with new ideas and forms, but also with a load of pre-romantic and romantic-realist traditions and with a little stiff narrative structure reminding of a shortsighted man’s uncertain gait: he has a lack of spatial vision in the dark; so, he gropes about in reality and still feels his prolific faltering and inner trepidation, for he doesn’t want to renounce creativity and eternal fear, which is useful and beautiful at the same time. This clumsiness of F. X. Svoboda is close to extreme aspects of modernism while retreating to the safety of pre-romantic positions of unpragmatic sensitivity, and shows prolificacy and bearing value of such pieces of literature: certainly, his works are neither concluding aesthetic peak nor experimental discharge, which could strike, but they bring the faltering and the existential gesture back into play. This gesture’s fumble is not a weakness, but a power, and its crudeness and schematization offer new development opportunities. These literary works, thanks to their indeterminacy and transitivity, present a future prerequisite layer and probably also a new promise. I. Pospíšil: Prolific Faltering in F. X. Svoboda‘s Prose and Its International Context. Revue des Études Slaves, tome Quatre-vingt-deuxième, fascicule 3. Rêve et utopie dans la littérature tchèque. Paris 2011, ISSN 0080-2557, s. 413-433. C. The Russian and the Czech-German Gothic Link: Fragments of Development and Comparison The 18^th and early 19^th –century Russian literature developed under the impact of West European models: the sentimentalist (travel and epistolary novels), picaresque and Gothic. The subject of the present contribution has much to do with the general pattern of the development of Russian literature. The key question concerning the evolution of Russian literature in general consists in the antinomies of the domestic, autochthonous and the foreign, imported. From the very beginnings of Russian literature the two sources can be observed and differentiated. The crucial problem of Russian literature in general is a long lasting process of overcoming several antinomies: Eastern – Western, Russian or Slavonic - European, East Slavonic - Old Church Slavonic, modern - archaic, postmodernist - traditional and - last but not least - domestic, autochthonous - imported, borrowed. This sometimes assumes the form of the conflict between the dramatic and the moral-depicting, the utilitarian and the spiritual. The Gothic link in Russian literature is part of the permanent conflict between the dramatic, extrinsic, intensive and intrinsic, extensive, describing, ethnographic and chronicle principles. It is prevalently associated with the development of the Russian novel in which the clash of the above-mentioned principles is obvious and dominant: while the static or stationary, passive, descriptive, chronicle principle have its roots in the autochthonous, Byzantine-Russian spiritual basis, the dramatic, intensive, adventurous elements belong to Western models which have been penetrating to Russia since the 17^th century; the majority of Asian elements came to Russia via Europe. One of the most influential factors of these clashes and of the tendency towards their synthesis was the unfinished process of secularisation: many secular literary genres including the novel were thus felt as unacceptable, even sinnful; therefore the final poetic shape of such artifacts was obviously different. We speak of the so-called pre-post effect or pre-post paradox: the imitation of Western models led Russian literature to the creation of peculiar, rather exotic literary forms and genres which seem to be an experimental new phase of the literary development while they represent an unfinished process of imitation of European morphological models. Apart from those who prefer the European, imitative Russian literary models and from those who, on the other hand, accentuate the genuine core of Russian cultural models (V. Kozhinov) speaking about 250 years of Russia’s cultural delay we stress the gradual absorption of Western models which look peculiar as they were originally permeated by the domestic, Russo-Byzantine and folklore roots: therefore the Russian baroque might appear in the 17^th and 18^th centuries as well as in 19^th-century Gogol’s short stories, sentimentalism might be absorbed by Nikolai Emin as well as by A. Radishchev and N. Karamzin in the 18^th century, but also by Dostoevsky in Poor People (1846) serving the means of the polemic with the poetics of the Russian Natural School, and Romanticism might prevail in V. Zhukovsky and A. Pushkin as well in Slavophile movement up to the 1880s. Such permanent returns to cultural models, currents and morphological patterns have seemed to be the typical features of the Russian literary development up to the 20^th century. The Gothic pattern was probably the weakest one, and it had its reasons consisting in the Russian literary evolution; at the time the works of the English Gothic novel were penetrating into other European literatures, Russian literature was more oriented on the model of the Enlightenment and rationalism; therefore the first Russian translations, for example, of Anne Radcliffe appeared in an old rationalistic poetic code. That is probably the reason why Russian literature preferred to adopt one specific layer of Gothic patterns, i. e. the picture of the shattered old rational world as the way not towards the pure romantic rebellious attitudes, but rather to the hidden, „superrational“, superrealist core of human and cosmic existence (see Dostoevsky’s slogan that he is „the realist in the supreme sense”). One of the first traces of the Gothic inspiration in Russian literature might be associated with N. M. Karamzin whose epistolary travel novel Pis'ma russkogo putešestvennika (1791-1792, completely 1801) played a key-role in the formation of modern Russian novel. Moreover, Karamzin’s peculiar book of travels - rather a philosophical and a literary treatise - is a valuable document of the historical events and the mentality of the last decades of the Age of Reason. Substantial parts of his Letters of a Russian Traveller are devoted to England and English literature; the author himself was a passionate reader of everything English, especially of English sentimentalist poetry and prose. His short story The Island of Bornholm (1794, Ostrov Borngol’m) inspired by the voyage in the Baltic contains a vague incestuous motif n the background of the medieval Gothic scenery typical of the island itself. The Russian tradition of enigmatic prose has its roots in German romantic movement connected with E. T. A. Hoffmann whose poetics appeared in Russia in the works of Antonij Pogorelsky (1787-1836), born as Aleksei Alekseevich Perovsky, illegitimate son of Count A. K. Razumovsky and countess Marija Sobolevskaja who spent two years in military service in Dresden. After a short time service in the Ministry of Education he was retired. Since the beginning of the 1820s he has spent th rest of his life in his estate in Ukraine. His most important work The Double or My Evenings in Little Russia (1828, Dvojnik, ili moi večera v Malorossii) introduced the figure of a double (Doppelgänger) continued then by Dostoevsky. In his fantasy for children The Black Hen or the The Subterranean People (1829, Černaja kurica, ili Podzemnyje žiteli) he described a secret underground kingdom, though the whole story has rather a didactic and moralistic character. The novella The Convent Girl (1833, Monastyrka) exploits the popular subject of European literature continuing sentimentalist poetics. The traces of the Gothic inspiration in Pogorelsky’s prose works are rare and go back rather to German romantic tradition („deutsche Romantik“) evoking the machinery of the Schauerroman and medieval folklore motifs. The Russian Decembrist prose writer Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (1797-1837), on the other hand, understood the Gothic pattern as a chance to manifest the existential dimension of human life in his novels The Castle Wenden (Zamok Venden, 1823), The Castle Neuhausen (Zamok Nejgauzen, 1824), The Traitor (1824, Izmennik) and The Tournament at Revel (1824, Revel’skij turnir) which also proclaimed the revolt against the feudal ethics and symbolically appeared on the eve of the Decembrist uprising, F. M. Dostoevsky used the Gothic machinery with sharp anti-catholic tendency expressed, for example, in Lewis’ Monk (the picture of the world here could be compared with the similar subject of Diderot’s enlightenment novel The Nun), especially in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov in which the whole Spanish scenery exploited by the English Gothic novel was applied. Dostoevsky’s predecessor even in the application of enigmatic tradition was N. V. Gogol. The early works of this Russo-Ukrainian author inspired by Ukrainian foklore motifs are, however, regarded as a mere reflection of the Romantic adoration of oral tradition. Even his early short stories Evenings in a Village near Dikanka and Mirhorod have common motifs with Gogol’s famous novellas from St. Petersburg cycle and his famous bitter comedies and with his „poema“ (originally lyric-epic poem, in this case a long poetical narrative) Dead Souls (1842). The Gogolian world seems to be an enachanted kingdom the enchantment of which is represented by animalised people (later a popular Kafkian motif), by a mechanical and puppet character of heroes and heroines, by the scenes of petrefaction. The Russian perception of Gothic motifs was at first rare and rather mechanical though they might be connected with the extrinsic features of old Russian foklore tradition of devil and „yurodivye“ stories which – together with the exorcist poetics penetrated even into The Life of Avvakum and, on the other hand, into other secular, 18^th-century picaresque structures of A Tale of Savva Grudtsyn or A Tale of Frol Skobeev. F. M. Dostoevsky and his Russian successors in the symbolist and modernist generation in general (Merezhkovsky, Sologub, Andreev) transformed the extrinsic, outer poetics into an intrinsic pattern: the motif of a double connected with Hoffmann’s poetics perceived through the work of Antonij Pogorelsky (1787-1836) as well as the features of the French roman frénétique and of the German Schauerroman manifested its impact upon the world literature. The Czech literary situation was a bit different because of the stronger and more direct impact of the German Schauerroman and the French roman noir or frénétique: the English Gothic patterns were perceived rather through the prism of French and German cultural patterns. They can be found in Jakub Arbes’ (1840-1914) romances called „romanettos“ in the Czech environment with mysterious motifs and enigmatic characters, often of religious and magic significance. Approximately at the same time the works of the famous Czech authoress Božena Němcová (1820?-1862) appeared: her picture of the world is rather idyllic, elegiac and sentimental, especially when she writes about the Czech nobility which – as she hopes – should play the similar role as the Polish aristocracy in its own country. The castle as the emblem of the nobility may have both the idyllic or elegiac and the enigmatic, mysterious and tragic character, may serve as a refuge and, at the same time, as a threat. Němcová’s motif of the castle (chateau) from her novel In the Castle and Beneath (1856, V zámku a podzámčí) fascinated Franz Kafka (1883-1924): his castle motif in his famous novel could be called „the inverted romantic idyll“ reflecting some aspects of the Gothic machinery which was, however, transformed into psychological structures: the irrational, but visible horrors of medieval castles and their ruins become the horrors inside human souls evoked by and connected with the castle scenery which symbolized a specific trigger of disasterous psychic processes. We might even say that the Czech idyllic and sentimental genre basis served as a poetic background for Kafka’s literary experiments. But there is another surprising or even shocking feature of this literature: the horrible hints and the world of mysterious threats are hidden under the surface forming a strange subterranean river going through all the literary streams covering both naive Romanticism, Enlightenment anti-Romanticism and neoromanticism as well as the elements of the rationalistic vision of the world. Němcová is not the first one to initiate this model: there is, of course, Karel Jaromír Erben (1811-1870) - called an anti-romantic romantic - with his poetic cycle A Bunch of Flowers of National Legends (1853, 1861, Kytice z pověstí národních) strongly influnced by folklore models, but innovating and transforming them in the similar way as Gogol in his pseudofolklore Ukrainian tales (this artificial horror atmosphere I tried to demonstrate in The Phenomenon of Madness in the 19^th and 20^th-Century Russian Literature which appeared in The Evenings in a Village near Dikan’ka or Mirhorod). Thus, we may even say that the Kafkian model of the Gothic pattern continuing the Czech link was based on real structural elements in the Czech artifacts themselves. In Kafka’s novels, especially in The Castle (Das Schloss) in The Trial (Der Prozess) the Russian, Dostoevskyan link is permeated by the mentioned Czech genre basis. The Kafkian link transforming the Gothic and idyllic imagery was continued by several Czech 20^th–century writers and philosophers. One of them was Jan Weiss (1892-1972) whose work was influenced by expressionistic poetics, e. g. A House With One Hundred Floors (1929, Dům o tisíci patrech), and in his minor enigmatic prose The Mirror Which Is Retarded (1964, Zrcadlo, které se opožďuje) or Uncle Žuliján’s Meteor (1930, Meteor strýce Žulijána). Ladislav Klíma (1878-1928)– apart from his philosophical writings – such as Treatises and Dictates (1922, Traktáty a diktáty), A Second and Eternity (1927, Vteřina a věčnost) and The World as the Conscience and Nothing (1904, Svět jako vědomí a nic) – wrote interesting fragmentary novels, e. g. The Czech Novel (partly 1967, complete version 1993, Český román), The Famous Nemesis (1932, Slavná Nemesis) and The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch (1928, Utrpení knížete Sternenhocha) in which he peculiarly reflected Gothic inspiration. Egon Hostovský, the Czech-Jewish writer, diplomat and then emigré in Norway and the USA who continued the Kafkian tradition in Czech literature in his early novellas based on the poetics of Czech expressionism The Closed Door (1926, Zavřené dveře), The Path Along the Way (1928, Stezka podél cesty), The Ghetto in Them (1928, Ghetto v nich), The Case of Professor Körner (1932, Případ profesora Körnera), The Black Gang (1933, Černá tlupa), The Fire Raiser (1935, Žhář) and The House Without Lord (1937, Dům bez pána) exploited the Gothic motifs in a Kafkian sense, as well as Václav Řezáč (1901-1956) in his early novels The Black Light (1940, Černé světlo), The Wittness (1942, Svědek) and The Boundary (1944, Rozhraní) where he plays with the light–darkness boundary symbolising the evolution of the psychic life of man. Jaroslav Havlíček (1896-1943) evoked the hororr atmosphere of a Czech provincial town and the whole sultry atmosphere on the eve of the Second World War and of the Nazi occupation in a peculiar milieu of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren) in his novels The Oil Lamps (1935, Petrolejové lampy), The Invisible (1937, Neviditelný), The Third Woman (1939, Ta třetí) and Helimadoe (1940). The aim of this short study is not the ouitline of all the works in both the Russian and the Czech 19t^h- and 20^th-century literature but a concise analysis of a certain poetic link leading from the Anglo-German roots to Russian applicants and new Czech and German modifications connecting the genuine summits of world literature including Gogol, Dostoevsky, Němcová, Kafka and modern 20^th-century European literature. This link could be prolonged to the period of postmodernism, but the real Gothic trace would become unclear and vague; so our method is rather a historical and evolutionary, genetic one. Let us return to Egon Hostovský, probably the most interesting case in the continuation of the Gothic link in German-Czech poetic chain strengthened by the Scandinavian (Ibsen) inspiration. The relation to Kafkian grotesque and absurd interpretation of the Gothic poetics stressed by the scenery of the Prague Castle (Hradčany) of his early short stories is nearly exactly reflected in Hostovský’s early short stories Mr. Lorenz, The Blue Light (both 1934, Pan Lorenz, Modré světlo) and Three Old Men (1938, Tři starci). In Mr. Lorenz there are two brothers: one earns money, the other studies medicine being dependant on his brother. The threat of unemployment forced the worker to create and intrigue which is later revealed by his brother. The Gothic link is represented by a mysterious Mr. Lorenz who invites the unemployed brother to Mexico. He was seen by nobody, being a symbol of evil forces which left rather a postmodernist feeling of uncertainty and ambiguity. The social motifs as a starting level of psychological and enigmatic scenery remind us of Dostoevsky of his short stories of the 1840s. The Blue Light, a typical Gothic ghost story about searching for a treasure in the churchyard is connected with the poetics of supernatural forces reminding us of the sentiment of one of Ray Bradbury’s short stories while The Three Old Men belong to the biographical narrative structure accentuating human life as something incredible, unstable, uncertain and enigmatic. It is characteristic that Egon Hostovský – unlike his colleagus mentioned above – did not leave this „Gothic“ position even in his novels and novellas written in the USA, such as Three Nights (1964, Tři noci), The Epidemic (1972, Epidemie) and A Charity Ball published first in English (1957, in Czech Dobročinný večírek, 1958, 1990): a mysterious visitor who tries to invade an apartment of a shattered family, a mysterious deaths and the epidemic in a town where a hero threatened by unemployment lives, and a charity ball culminating in a suicide – all this represents the world of the absurd interpersonal relations and shattered and later destroyed values – the Gothic machinery is just an emblem of the disasters in human souls. The Gothic link in Russian literature goes on also in the 20^th century, but we tried to show just the chain leading from the Gothic poetics towards the Russian romanticism (A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky) and the neoromantic structures in Dostoevsky and further to Kafka who also reflected the Czech literary experience associated with the emblem of the castle and the layers of the uncertainty hidden under the idyllic, sentimental and elegiac surface, and further to the Czech expressionist and psychoanalytical inspiration. From the genre standpoint the Gothic form arose as the counterpoint of the idyllic and elegiac structures; the other side of the idyllic scenery with the absence of any conflict is the permanent threat and uncertainty evoked by Gothic poetics; the modern psychological novel frequently reminded us of a sort of an intrinsic horror which arose as a result of the permeation of the extrinsic Gothic machinery and the intrinsic tendency towards idyllic stability and the relatively petrified order of things and men. 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Ivo Pospíšil: The Russian and the Czech-German Gothic Link: Fragments of Development and Comparison. In: I. P. Slavistika na křižovatce, chapter III, Brno 2003. D. The Danger of Loneliness: the New „Splendid Isolation“ (Some Remarks Concerning the Transformation of Culture and Humanities as a Global Process) After the epoch rupture at the break of the 1980’s and 1990’s the profound transformation of all Central and East European countries seemed to be inevitable and, at the same time, quite easy. In the beginning it was understood as a mere application of Western mo-dels, but very early it appeared to be insolvable: on one hand there were relatively great differences between various post-communist countries, on the other the transformation itself could not be regarded as a mere return, but as a process which had never been realised before. It became obvious that the period of different phases of "socialism" could not be erased, but critically evaluated. The process of the so-called transformation seems to happily coincide with the process of globalization: everything is permeated with each other, everything is mutually dependant, everything forms the inevitable chain of being. As any process covering or trying to cover all spheres of life, i. e. the process of totalization, the globa-lization swallowed all the minor processes including those of the above-mentioned transformation of post-comumunist countries. The globalization itself is a contradictory process which means nothing more than the movement towards the complexity of life of modern man, the aim of which was depicted in various anti-utopian novels. This crucial change which is being realised at the end of the second millenary may have both positive and negative features, but – asit seems – is irreversible: the process of transformation in post-communist countries is gradually becoming part of this process. In the first stage at the beginning of the 1990’s the movement was one-sided: the influence of West-European democracies was prevalent and very strong. The main method of adopting new phenomena and new thinking was often a mechanical imitation, sometimes connected with the reminiscences of the democratic past, e. g. in former Cze-choslovakia. This process had two faults: the mechanical imitation was applied in the political situation which was very different from that of traditional or newly – after the Second World War – built western democracies. The situation in Czechoslovakia just after the so-called Velvet Revolution also had several stages of develop-ment. The first was connected with the illusions of the 1968 Prague Spring. Some of the protagonists of the Velvet Revolution were convinced that the 1989 revolution was a mere return towards the reform of communism in 1968 – therefore in the first November and December weeks the majority of the Czechs and Slovaks spoke about socialism, but a differrent, humanized one. It was closely associated with the leading position of some of the 1968 men including Alexan-der Dubček who repeated these theses even in the function of the Chairman of the Federal Assembly during their visits abroad. The second stage consisted in the rapid way to capitalist society: in the beginning the mass media did not even mention the word capitalism using just „the market economy“ – the word „capitalism“ has pre-vailed since the 1992 and was connected with the shock therapy, the mass privatization etc. The rapid movement towards the capitalist world economy, towards economic and financial world and Euro-pean structures was necessary, but at the same time, it should have been taken into account that these processes had a one-sided cha-racter of a direct application: they concerned just the elementary and the most important economic-financial and, of course, political and judicial structures, less more profound strata of national life connec-ted with mentality, social psychology, language and culture. Besides, it is important to note that the mentioned processes applied on the surface of the life of society met with the strata which survived as the undercurrent from the times of the pre-war democratic Czechoslova-kia or even from the times of the communist regime. One thing has a crucial importance from the methodological point of view: there is no one type of democracy, there is no one type of capitalism, socialism, there were different presuppositions in the political system of each post-communist country. And moreover, the so-called social-lism has its own stages of development in each country which must be differentiated: they seem to be negligible, but sometimes represent the necessary answers to the questions the western resear-chers often ask. It would be very incorrect and false from the methodological point of view to analyse the process of transfor-mation in post-communist countries in laboratory conditions as seen from the standpoint of the so-called standard democracies because they themselves are in motion, in the process of fatal changes the final character of which cannot be fully predicted. To speak of the process of transformation in post-communist countries at the same time means to speak of the current processes in Europe and in other countries, especially in the countries of the Third World. Each country has its instrinsic conditions often hidden in the depth of history and mentality of its inhabitants, then there are extrinsic differences between these countries and, of course, the differentiated positions in relation to European and other countries. A special problem may be represented by the contemporary situation of the „neue Länder“ in Germany. All this forms a very dense net of chao-tic links and interferences which prevent us from the easy and transparent analysis of the past, the present and the future evolution. The process of transformation in the Central and Eastern Europe could not be understood without these widest contexts as part of global world problems which also concern the dangerous centraliza-tion and concentration of power in certain countries, the problem of big and small countries, the real fate of minor languages and the relation of élites to the rest of the population, the problem of the intellectual level of those who desire to be responsible for mankind – it is obvious enough that one must have an icy feeling when watching the heroes and heroines of the neverending Beverly Hills serials. We have already mentioned the one-sidedness of the transforma-tional process in the post-communist countries at the beginning of the 1990´s, but it must not be ignored that this process also has a reverse side: the stealthy influence of the transforming East upon the West. Though it was neither denied, nor cofirmed by serious ana-lyses, but any Eastern visitor of Western countries if he had the opportunity to compare, say, the 1970’s, the 1980’s and the 1990’s speaks about the striking change of attitude in transport, services, behaviour of people, the hierarchy of values in general, the rising social, ethnic and psychological tension. If we take into account all this complexity of the transformational processes in Central and Eastern Europe, intrinsic, extrinsic, historical, mental or psychology-cal, archetypal, political, institutional, it is not difficult to imagine how complicated the situation must be in the sphere of culture, humanities and other related fields of science and thought. The global character of the changes realised in the sphere of humanities is demonstrated on the example of traditional philological disciplines. As nearly everything in this new fin de siècle the literary scholarship and criticism find itself at the crossroads both metho-dological, thematic and existential. Everybody feels that under the influence of rapid changes in technology and in the way of life of modern man in general our traditional philological disciplines have to be changed – the major question is, however, not if but when and how. Nowadays humanities in general and traditional philology in particular have to overcome many new and unexpected obstacles, have to deal with new things and phenomena closely associated with the development of technological society at the end of the second millenium. The crucial troubles also consist in the crisis of academic education. The idyllic picture of the evolution of literary criticism seems to be false: the real state of things could be characterized as the disin-tegration and dispersion. Literary criticism has been divided into many discourse and territorial groupings which do not communicate with each other. The tendency towards the conception of literary criticism as a norm-making discipline was substituted by the freely conceived cluster of impressionistic ideas and interpretations. The present Central European model of literary criticism should undergo substantial changes. One of the most topical is the problem of literary streams and currents which divided the totality of literary process and often suppressed individual features of artifacts. The confron-tation with the close historical study of the artifacts’ poetics might lead to a more real picture of the development of literature and change the artificial paradigms which do not often correspond to the intrinsic structures of works of art. The theory of literary kinds (genres) named „literary genology“ faces the same problems. Aris-totle’s genre systematics completed from time to time with new literary kinds, terms and definitions draws nearer to its collapse; the search for a new semantic key became the necessary condition for further development of this sphere of literary criticism. The author of the present contemplation offers the entity of Slavonic literatures and that of Slavonic studies as a convenient level of communication; the history of literary criticism shows how often Slavonic literatures and Slavonic studies have given birth to new general conceptions (R. Jakobson, R. Wellek, F. Wollman). Another problem concerns the relations of literary criticism to the concept of social studies (socio-logy, political science, social psychology etc.); the author’s concept is based on the open model of mutual communication between philology and social sciences, but, on the other hand, he insists on the necessity to preserve the methodological integrity and consis-tency of literary criticism as an independent discipline. The first problem is associated with the search for a new metho-dology which is sometimes linked with the impact of social sciences with new, more aggressive cluster of methods which more directly reflect the economic or even financial conditions the society lives in. It is also connected with the end of cold war and iron curtain policy changing the area or areal principles giving more room for traditional philology which earlier functioned as a mere service for those who dealt more or less with political science. This impact could be seen at the Twelfth International Congress of Slavists in Cracow (August-September 1998) where some voices even called for the cancellation of all the traditional concepts of Slavonic studies which were said to be connected with various ideologies. Though these voices were rejected by the majority of participants the impact of social sciences appeared, for example, in the foundation of a new Slavonic discipline called „emigrantology“ which aroused the interest of the present slavists, but also a high degree of scepticism. Nevertheless, the exis-tence of the International Committee of Central and East European Studies, influential especially in English speaking countries, its con-gresses, its methods of work, open new fields for mutual cooperation, but, on the other hand, lead to the neccesity of strictly formulated methodology and the area of research of traditional Slavonic philology. The discussions associated with the university crisis, with the inevitable changes in humanities in general and philology in particu-lar have been reflected in the famous American discusion of 1996-1997 on the pages of Daedalus, the journal of the American Acade-my of Arts and Sciences (Fall 1997) a Profession published by the Modern Language Association (1996). Some of the reflections of these problems can also be found in the collection of contributions published in English in Nitra, Slovakia (Tracing Literary Postmoder-nism. University of Constantine the Philosopher, Faculty of Humani-ties, Institute of Literary Communication, editor. Tibor Žilka, Nitra 1998). The study by Michel Holquist (Profession, 1996) expresses the trends leading to the permeation of comparative studies, the area studies and the study of foreign languages. The author demonstrates the split of traditional philology and social sciences as a result of cold war in which the politically oriented area studies prevailed. In the Nitra contributions to postmodernism Donald Cary Freeman, pro-fessor of English studies and law at the University of South Califor-nia, declares the fall of traditional philological unity mentioning the famous article written by Alan Sokal and published in the journal Social Text. This nonsense article was published because it suited the ideological bias of the editor. Freeman calls for the reconstitution of the unity of language and literature studies as a „New Philology“, otherwise the tendency in the USA and western Europe might lead to the deprofessionalization of philology as such. The Slavonic studies in the Czech Republic – though intrinsically differentiated – are based on traditional philology with the back-ground of other disciplines including history, ethnology, folklore studies, less philosophy and political science. The school of compa-rative studies in Brno has a tradition going back to the 1920s and 30s. It is connected with the work of Frank Wollman and his students – the tradition of genre research within the framework of various Slavonic Institutions at the Arts Faculty of Masaryk University in Brno has gone on since the 1970s. However, the present metho-dology would bring together Slavonic, English, Romance, German and Classical Studies and would simultaneously connect with philosophical, historical and sociological texts. In this sense, the newly established disciplines could also be linked to the disciplines which will start to develop in the newly created Faculty of Social Sciences of Masaryk University. It is impossible simply to adher to the Czech tradition – it is essential to study those trends being pursued, especially in the Anglo-American world, which are known as metahistory. Trends similar to metahistory are also appearing in other social sciences as well as in philosophy. The substance of this approach is the conception of a scholarly text as a distinctively structured narrative. It would be necessary to draw parallels between Anglo-American metahistory and the similar movement in Scandina-vian countries and also with the new Franco-Polish study of manu-scripts (manuscriptology), and to compare the Russian work being carried out by the cultural historians associated with the journal Odissej (Ulysses). The impact od social studies is nevertheless felt, but it is much weaker in the sphere of linguistics than in literary scholarship which is quite understandable. To avoid the danger of mechanical connec-tion of the two mentioned scientific spheres, for example, as a study of language and literature as the means for social and political stu-dies a small group of researchers from the Institute of Slavonic Studies at the Faculty of Arts and the Department of Political Scien-ce at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Brno started the supported research in the sphere of textual typology trying to link the disci-plines dealing with both belles lettres and special texts connected with journalism and the study of mass media. The key to this re-search, which is the result of the new impact of social sciences upon traditional philology caused by the contemporary situation of areal studies, consists in the conception of fiction and non-fiction as a certain type of the narration which may be analysed as a particular genre entity. The seminar held in Brno in summer 1998 came to the specific spheres of interest which have an interdisciplinary character: the linguistic characterization of the text, the problem of transitory genres on the boundary of fiction and non-fiction, the place of mass literature (Trivialliteratur), the visualisation of the text and the elec-tronic media, the text and the rhetoric and the new terminology. The specific subject called „Integrated Comparative Genre Studies“ seems to have the following structure: the general history and theory of literary genres, the comparative history of literature, the genre structure of non-fiction, literature as a source of information for social sciences, literary character of social studies, the problem of the language in fiction and non-fiction. The main aim of the study group is to overcome the methodological split between the two big groups of sciences and to avoid the situation in which traditional philology served for the purposes of social sciences as auxiliary means. Now the representatives of areal studies which are the transitory zone between social sciences and philology show that they need not only practical language, but the whole linguistic and cultural background. Without the practical knowledge of the language of a particular area in all its dimensions including historical and with clusters of allu-sions presented in literature which became the common property of all educated people it is very hard to construct the principles the political system should be based on. The problem of nearly all post-communist governments consists in the ignorance of the scientific capacity of humanities in their own countries. The state sometimes takes use of the experts in sociology, political science, psychology, rarely in philosophy and religious stu-dies and nearly never in philology, most probably because the politi-cians regard philology as a peculiar, strange discipline of the people studying grammatical categories or some mad, experimental texts. Probably this ignorance is connected with the underrating of huma-nities and academic life in general what is the heritage of communist régime under which everything intellectual was considered suspi-cious. This anti-intellectual arrogance associated with the conviction that every philologist is an unpractical umbrella-forgetting professor from poor jokes prevents the sphere of philology from being better financially supported and the governmental circles from being better and more profoundly informed about the fields of their interest than from the monitoring of current media. In doing so, they stimulate conservatism in philology and not the necessary permeation of both scientific spheres which may become the real intellectual basis of the transformation process in humanities in general. Speaking about the Slavonic studies, especially about literary criticism, Europe is divided into several discourse groups connected more with their geographical and economic-political position than with their methodology. In the desert full of the voices of separate discourse groups there are, for example, the Polish-Ukrainian-Belorussian entity, the South-European entity connecting the Balkans and Italy with the inclination towards Slovenia and Austria, the entity reflecting the term Mitteleuropa etc. The panels usually used at big conferences, e g. at congresses of the International Council for Central and East European Studies or at International Conferences of Slavists, confirm the methodological split, the division into discourse groups which do not communicate with each other, they rather pass each other. This passing is probably the most typical phenomenon of contemporary situation in Slavonic literary criticism and, I am afraid, not only of it. The tendencies leading to the reduction of the influence of traditional literary scholarship dealing with the system of literary communication, with literary evolution and with the social functions of literature, its aesthetics and genre systematics must be substituted by the gradual intrinsic reform, by the revaluation of old terminology and a new literary material. The problem of literary streams or currents sometimes led to the depersonalization of artifact – „the currentness“ apllied on the art of individual writers unfortunately substituted the inner dynamism of artifacts by outer generalization. Under the impact of the so-called currents the indivi-dual qualities of a work of art disappears: the mainstream loses the narrow streams in which the hidden layer of meaning is situated, the meaning which may reach, as Bakhtin puts it, its feast of resurrec-tion. Also the subjective interpretation of artifacts leading towards the liquidation of general vision and the prescriptive function of lite-rary scholarship – as it must be a little prescriptive not to lose its social and intellectual influence – led to an impass. One of the possibilities how to overcome the danger of lone-liness in culture and humanities at the end of the second millenium is to find the common methodological level and the point of inter-section of different disciplines. The transformation does not concern the so-called post-commu-nist countries of Central and East Europe only, but it has a global character. The virus of permanent change penetrated into the coun-tries of traditional Western democracy bringing new phenomena and angles, but also new criteria of evaluation and new, rather chaotic hierarchies: the danger of chaos on one hand and that of the defensive strategy of new „splendid isolation“ on the other seem to be the forces of the strongest brisance. The genuine, real transformation must have inevitably a global character and must touch the deepest spiritual structures covering the range from everyday politics up to the most elaborate structures of scientific thought. Ivo Pospíšil: The Danger of Loneliness: the New „Splendid Isolation“.Some Remarks Concerning the Transformation of Culture and Humanities as a Global Process, in: Integrovaná žánrová typologie (Komparativní genologie). Projekt – metodologie – terminologie – struktura oboru – studie. Hlavní autoři: Ivo Pospíšil – Jiří Gazda - Jan Holzer. Editor: Ivo Pospíšil. Masarykova univerzita, Brno 1999, s.- 89-100. ISBN 80-210-2192-6 E. Peter Demetz: A Conversation with René Wellek Extract as an Illustration for Educational Purposes only http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/crossc/anw0935.1990.001/145:ANW0935.1990.001?page=root;rgn=full+text;si ze=100;view=image;q1=A+Conversation++with+Rene+Wellek The full text of the conversations was published in Czech with the author’s consent in: Ivo Pospíšil, Miloš Zelenka: René Wellek a meziválečné Československo. Ke kořenům strukturální estetiky. Masarykova univerzita, Brno 1996. DEMETZ: I many countries and cities of Europe, intellectuals and writers these days are very much interested again in what they call Mitteleuropa. Often these writers live in, or come from, regions that once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Intellectuals in Budapest, Vienna, and Trieste, and among Czech writers Milan Kundera in Paris, ask questions about Middle Europe and rediscover its history. It is not quite clear yet whether they are thinking of a new kind of utopia, a convenient dream, or of theirnostalgia for times past. What would you say? WELLEK: I think the term itself is somewhat suspicious. It was invented by Friedrich Naumann during the war in 1915. It was obviouisly a part of the German war propaganda, and aimed at establishing a central European monarchy which would be wider than Prussia. The concept itself, I think, is pretty vague, for it is not clear what its boundaries are. I would say that it expresses a mood of nostalgia. DEMETZ: You probably have many memories of your childhood and early youth in Vienna in which so many mitteleuropäisch cultures came together. Did people talk about Mitteleuropa at that time, or did they rather see themselves as belonging to one ot the other nation that made up the Austro-Hungarian monarchy? WELLEK: My father was an Austrian official who worked in Vienna but was born in Prague, and he had very strong Czech national feelings. We were totally opposed to the Austrian monarchy and felt our opposition very strongly, simply by being outsiders in Vienna. I remember that neighbours called us böhmische Schweine. We were members of the Protestant church, actually the Lutheran church, and in old Austria we had to choose between Lutherans and Calvinists; no other possibility existed. We were compelled to go downtown to the Dorotheengasse for religious instruction, and we got a heavy dose of the Lutheran history of the Reformation. When the Monarchy fell apart I was 15 years old. I think I was not very conscious of the terrible destruction of the war, and my father looked forward to the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic; in the first days of October, 1918, he immediately left for Prague, convinced there would be a Czechoslovak Republic, I myself and my brother were being prepared for the move. My father engaged a Protestant pastor, Skalák by name, to tutor us in the Czech language. We could speak Czech because of our contacts with nannies and because we usually spent the summers in Bohemia, but we could not write properly and had little grammar. My father expected that the Austrian monarchy would collapse and that there would be a Czechoslovak state; he was looking foreward with enthusiasm ti the establishment of the new Republic. DEMETZ: If I remember correctly, your father was also a writer and translator who translated Vrchlický and Machar into German. How did he feel about his commitment to translation at a time when his neighbours called him a böhmisches Schwein? WELLEK: My father did these translations long before that time – when he was a student in Prague, in 1892-93. I have still some of the volumes with dedications by Vrchlický. They are all dated 1892-93. He heard lectures by Vrchlický, who happened to speak on Calderon. My father had a taste for this pre-modern poetry. The newest poet, I suppose, was Machar, whom he personally knew later in Vienna. DEMETZ: When you came as a boy or young man from Prague to Vienna, do you remember any differences in the mood of the people and in the daily experiences of 1918-1919? WELLEK: We shared the enthusiasm and optimism of my father, and we very definitely felt, I think, the contrast between collapsing Austria with its shortages and the booming, optimistic Prague and Czechoslovakia. I think that is an important fact that he Czechs felt a rebirth, a renewal of their age-long dream of independence, and had no qualms about it. The alliance with France and the allies in general was only natural, because Germany was defeated, and rightly considered to be still resentful and potentially dangerous. DEMETZ: The first years of the Republic were full of enthusiasm but there were real difficulties, social unrest, strikes, the establishment of the Communist Party, and very soon the Republic itself enmeshed in an armed conflict with Béla Kun and the Budapest Spartakus; they had to fight it out in Slovakia. Were you aware of these problems, or were you concentrating on your studies? WELLEK: I was, in a certain extent, aware of it, but it did not really concern me, the conflict in Slovakia was too short and too far away to be of immediate concern. We were schoolboys in the fifth grade of the reálné gymnasium in Křemencová ulice in Prague. We had only a remote interest in these matters although we did know about social conflicts. My school was extremely democratic. There was a whole spectrum of students from all classes, i.e. the son of Alois Rašín, the Minister of Finances (he was murdered in 1923), and there were students who came from the slums of the Prague suburbs of Karlín and Žižkov. But I think in the class we hardly noticed this. Certainly the teachers knew and tried to treat everybody the same way, it was all on equal basis. DEMETZ: How would you describe the cultural environment in Prague? In your essay you often speak about Prague “at the crossroads”, and I think it was often stressed in the First Republic that Prague really was located in the heart of Europe, where all intellectual tendencies came together and were made fruitful. Holw would you describe your own feelings about this time? WELLEK: Prague survived the Austrian Empire, in its distinct Czech tradition which was freely renewed, and new contacts with France and the Anglo-Saxon world were established. My brother and I were in some way exceptions. We had no French in school in Vienna but only English, and therefore we had to pass examinations in English: when we came to Prague, the gymnasium to which we went had no provisision for the teaching in English. Now this was very important for me in later times, it concentrated my orientation on the Anglo-Saxon world; we both read English very well when we passed our final examination, the matura. It would seem to be quite obvious that, as I wanted to study literature, I would study what was called at the Czech university Germanic Philology which included English. […] DEMETZ: Were there any refugees from Soviet Russia in Prague? Did you meet any? Did the government of the Republic care? WELLEK: I met such people much later, in the ’30s, but I remember that in 1919 we lived out in a suburb of Prague Krč and there was a performance staged by Russian refugees. They danced, the men performed a Cossack dance which I had not seen before, and money was collected. Then of course I knew and heard more and more about the Russians and Ukrainians universities founded and financed by the Czechoslovak Parliament in Prague. I heard about them in the Prague Linguistic Circle but that was of course only in the ’30s. I met Dmitrij Čiževskij who was later a very eminent Slavicist, and there were others, a man called Savickij who was a geographer. Roman Jakobson was very important in the Prague Linguistic Circle; he of course came from Moscow, had his Russian contacts, and occasionally brought Russian scholars from Soviet Union. One of the most eminent formalists, Boris Tomaševskij, gave a lecture in Prague. An important figure in the Prague Linguistic Circle was a Russian called Karcevskij, who had studied with de Saussure in Geneva and mediated, I think, between the so-called Saussurean linguistics and the new Russian phonology as cultivated by Jakobson, Mathesius, and others. But that was later when I came back from the United States (I had been there for almost three years), and attended the Congress of Phonology in December 1930 which the Prague Linguistic Circle organized; there were eminent people like Karl Bühler, from Vienna at that time, and Brøndal from Denmark. It was a really international gatherings, but I do not think I quite understood everything which went on; I learned that the new linguistics wanted to get away from the old history of vowels and consonants and turn attention to the wholeness of the spoken language. DEMETZ: May we come back to the ‘20s before we go on to the ‘30s? I read some of your essays on Czech literature (there is an essay you wrote on Czechs and Germans, in the ‘30s, I think in London), and there you suggest that there was a “Chinese wall” between the nations. Did this apply also to native Prague German-Jewish, or German culture, or did it apply more to the Austrians and Germans beyond the frontiers? WELLEK: In Prague, as you know, there was a Czech University and a German University. There was certainly a gulf between the two, though they were often housed in the same old halls of the Clementinum, the 17^th century building of the university. I was, I think, one of the very few students of the Czech university who enrolled as a visiting student, or auditor, in the German Department of the German University. I took a seminar of Professor August Sauer who was then a prominent authority, largely on Austrian literature, Grillparzer, and others. I remeber his last seminar; he retired the very same year, and I did not go to any courses any more, but I met people from the German University, among them Josef Körner. So I was, I think, an exception in establishing some contanct. On the whole there was a gulf. In the German University there was a division between the Sudetendeutsche, meaning Germans from the frontier regions, and the Prague Jewish intellectuals. A few of them were professors at the university. I should explain that in the old Austria there were five universities, Vienna, Innsbruck, Graz, Czernowitz, and Prague. It was unlikely for a Jew to be appointed professor in either Salzburg or Innsbruck. They became Privatdozenten in Czernowitz, and moved from there when they were promoted to the University of Prague. I remember that especially at the faculty of law there were many professors of Jewish origin. DEMETZ: Were there any students from the other side, from the German side, say, people studying Slavic literatures, or was that absolutely impossible? WELLEK: I think it did happen, there were occasionally students from a German University. But I have not seen or did not meet any. At the Czech University (I am now speaking about my student years from 1922-26) we were a very closed company of students of German and English. Arnošt Kraus was the professor, an older Jewish man in his 60s who had studied in Munich and was a a very learned man in the field of old Czech history. He had written book on Old Czech history in German lterature; he would list and discuss any book which used, say, the stories of Libuše and Krok in German literature. He taught the history of Minnesäng which, I thought was quite interesting. I still remember with pleasure that he gave me two letters to interpret, one by Wieland, the other one by Platen, and you had to transcribe their originals. He gave the original documents to you, he had them from a castle library, or from some archives. You had to copy the text, to find out to whom the letter was addressed, and you had to explain all the allusions and so on. In the case of the Platen letter it was very simple because I soon discovered that exactly the same sequence of events were to be found in the diaries of Platen, in almost the same way. He wrote letters to friends and transcribed them from his journals. But Wieland was very difficult, it took a long time to find out who could be the addressee and to explain some of the allusions; I must say that it was in some ways a very good exercises, we were forced to use the library and study there. The library was very old fashioned; it had a wonderful collection of old theological and historical books, leather-bound catalogues that were hand-written. I also very much appreciated the seminar which the English department had established in an apartment house in a street near the university. There Professor Vilém Mathesius, professor of English, had a very nice collection of English books, Three or four thousand volumes, the whole set of Dickens, the whole big Cook-Wedderburn edition of Ruskin, the whole edition of Carlyle, George Eliot, and Meredith, and so on; there you could use them right in the spot and read them but also take them out, though with some restrictions. I always admired this and thought that having a small library for students is the basis of any education. Students are lost in he kind of library wich the Prague university library represented, not to speak of the enormous libraries here in the United States where students are often completely baffled by what they must often consider a cemetery of books. DEMETZ: While you were students of English literature, the Prague Jewish-German writers were very productive. Brod, Werfel (he went away soon), and Kafka. Were you aware of their productions, of this kind of literature, or did it come to you later, as it were, by import? WELLEK: No. I read Kafka in the ‘20s, I think I even heard of him before, in Vienna perhaps. I remember well that I read him, but of course I never met him, he was in a TB sanatorium in 1924, I think and he died there. I latzer met Max Brod through something called the Prague Philosophical Circle which was established in the ‘30s by Prtsident Masaryk, I believe, and it was chaired by Oskar Kraus, a student of Franz Brentano. There I met Max Brod and Felix Weltsch. But we had met other Jewish intellectuals like Hugo Bergmann (whom later became the Rector of the University of Jerusalem) largely through a friend of my mother, Hugo Salus, M. D., who was a gynecologist but also a poet who wrote a good deal and was, for his time, quite well known. There was a collection of poems Ehefrühling which in retrospect is sentimental. He died in 1929, we lost touch, he was ill for a long time. I remember that for the first time I heard Hebrew spoken, modern Hebrew. […] DEMETZ: Maybe we can return to the question with which we started, namely Mitteleuropa. Many people who nowadays discusss Mitteleuropa would really be inclined to claim you for themselves. They would argue, you are coming from that great conglomerate of nations of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, you received your first education in Vienna moving, as it were, on the border-line between German schools and the Czech and Slavic Background, then you went to Prague which became the center of cultural crosscurrents between East and West, an in your case, possibly North and South. They would say you are precisely a luminous example of the mitteleuropäisch mind. At the same time my impression is that you are rather sceptical about the possibilities of what I might call a mitteleuropäisch projection, utopia, or expectation? WELLEK: I agree that In am in a sense a Central European whose sight is turned towards Czech, English, and German. There are the languages and literatures I know best. I agree, unfortnately, that a restoration of the old Mitteleuropa as iut supposedly existed under the Austrian monarchy is impossible for reasons which have nothinhg, it seems to me, to do with cultural situation, but is simply a result of the invasion of Europe in 1944 by the Soviet armies which occupied the territory that even today is under their influence. They are occupied directly or ruled indirectly, And there seems to be no chance of reversing the process at all in the nearest future. DEMETZ: Some people do believe in Mitteleuropa as an idea, and I am sceptical about it. The believe that it would be possible to create, or restore, some kind of cultural consciousness, let’s say, between Budapest and Vienna, and Prague and Trieste. They hope that without changing the political structure, such an idea would really contribute to a greater intellectual productivity. WELLEK: I don’t think that there is much communication between, let’s say, Ljubljana, Trieste, Budapest, and Vienna. There are considerable differences between these places, due to nationalism and political developments, and what they have in common is often ther relationship to things outside. There is a similarity in their attitudes towards the West. If one studies, for example, a movement like realism, one does not find interrelationships or similarities between Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Yugoslav realism in the 19th century due to any kind of mutual influences, but due to the fact that there is the French realistic novel and the English novel, Dickens and so on, which influenced all these national literatures. Cross Currents. AYearbook of Central European Culture, volume 9 (1990), pp. 135-145. A SELECTED LIST OF RECOMMENDED LITERATURE Altmann, F.-L. – Andreeff, W.: Future Expansion of the European Union in Central Europe. Wien 1995. Areál – sociální vědy – filologie. Ed. Ivo Pospíšil. Kabinet integrované žánrové typologie, Ústav slavistiky, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Brno 2002. Areálová slavistika a dnešní svět. Monografie z filologicko-areálových studií. Ed.: Ivo Pospíšil. Česká asociace slavistů. Tribun EU, Brno 2010, s. 3-5. ISBN 978-80-7399-987-2. Bister, F. (hrsg.): Kulturelle Wechselseitigkeit in Mitteleuropa. Ljubljana 1995. Brněnská hungaroslavistika a česko-slovensko-maďarské vztahy. Eds: Ištván Käfer, Ivo Pospíšil, red. Erika Sztakovicsová. Vydanie podporil IVF 21110172 Academic discussion on history, culture and religion of Visegrád nations: new directions. Gerhardus Kiadó. Vydané v spolupráci s Kabinetom hungaroslavistiky Ústavu slavistiky FF MU (Brno) a Českou asociáciou slavistov, Visegrád Fund, Segedín 2012. Burmeister, H.-P.: Boldt, F.: - Mészáros, G.: (Hrsg.): Mitteleuropa: Traum oder Trauma? Bremen 1988. Busek, E. – Bix, E.: Projekt Mitteleuropa. Wien 1986. Busek, E. – Wilflinger: Aufbruch nach Mitteleuropa: Rekonstruktion eines versunkenen Kontinents. Wien 1986. Busek, E.: Mitteleuropa: Eine Spurensicherung. Wien 1997. Central Europe. Core or Periphery? Copenhagen Business School Press, København 2000. Centrisme interlittéraire des littératures de l’Europe Centrale. Literární studie. Práce Slovanského ústavu AV ČR, 5, Masarykova univerzita, Brno 1999. Redacteurs: Ivo Pospíšil, Miloš Zelenka. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N. : Krise der Weltanchauung. Wien 1923. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N. : Weltmacht Europa. Stuttgart 1971. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N.: Kommen die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa? Glarus 1938. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N.: Pan-Europa. Wien 1923. Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N.: Totaler Staat – totaler Mensch. Wien 1937. Čermák, R., Maiello, G.: Nástin dějin a literatury Lužických Srbů. Středoevropské centrum slovanských studií, edice Evropské obzory, Brno 2011, s. 5-6. ISBN 978-80-86735-09-2. Decloedt, L. R.-G., Van Uffalen, H.: (Hg.): Der niederländische Sprachraum und Mitteleuropa. Wien – Köln – Weimar 1995. Demetz, P.: Prague in Black and Gold. Scenes from the Life of a European City. New York 1997. Gauss, K.-M.: Die Vernichtung Mitteleuropas. Klagenfurt – Salzburg 1991. Gerlich, P./Glass, K. (hrsg.): Vergangenheit und Gegenwart Mitteleuropas. Wien – Poznań 1998. Gerlich, P./Glass, K./, Kiss Endre (hrsg.): Von der Mitte nach Europa und zurück. Wien – Poznań 1997. Gerlich, P./Glass, K./Serloth, B. [Hg.]: Mitteleuropäische Mythen und Wirklichkeiten. Wien - Toruń 1996. Gerlich, P./Glass, K./Serloth, B. [Hg.]: Neuland Mitteleuropa. Ideologiedefizite und Identitätskrisen. Wien-Toruń 1995. Gimpl, G. (hrsg.): Mitteleuropa. Mitten in Europa. Helsinki 1996. Glass, K./ Puślecki, Z. W. (Hg.): Mitteleuropäische Orientierung der 90er Jahre. Wien – Poznań 1999. Goworowska-Puchala, I.: Mitteleuropa. Rdzeń Starego Kontynentu. Toruń 1997. Gürge, W.: Paneuropa und Mitteleuropa. Berlin 1929. Hantos, E.: Das Donauproblem. Wien 1928. Hantos, E.: Das Geldproblem in Mitteleuropa. Jena 1925. Hantos, E.: Das mitteleuropäische Agrarproblem und seine Lösung. Berlin 1931. Hantos, E.: Die Handelspolitik in Mitteleuropa. Jena 1925. Hantos, E.: Die Kulturpolitik in Mitteleuropa, Stuttgart 1926. Hantos, E.: L’Europe centrale. Une nouvelle organisation économique. Pars 1932. Hantos, E.: Mitteleuropäische Eisenbahnpolitik. Zusammenschluß der Eisenbahnsysteme von Deutschland, Österreich, Ungarn, Tschechoslowakei, Polen, Rumänien und Jugoslawien. Wien 1929. Hantos, E.: Mitteleuropäische Kartelle im Dienste des industriellen Zusammenschlusses. Berlin 1931. Hantos, E.: Mitteleuropäische Wasserstraßenpolitik. Berlin 1932. Hodža, M.: Federácia v strednej Európe a iné štúdie. Bratislava 1997. Hodža, M.: Schicksal Donauraum. Erinnerungen. Mit einem Geleitwort von Dr. Otto von Habsburg. Wien – München – Berlin 1995. Jahn, E.: Bibliographie zur Mitteleuropa Diskussion. Beilage. Zeitschrift für Politik und Kultur im Mittel- und Osteuropa, Nr. 21, November 1988. Jeřábek, Miroslav: Za silnou střední Evropu: středoevropské hnutí mezi Budapeští, Vídní a Brnem v letech 1925-1939. Dokořán, Praha 2008. Johnson, L. R.: Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. New York – Oxford 1996. Katzenstein, P. J. (ed.): Mitteleuropa. Between Europe and Germany. Providence – Oxford 1997. Kautman, F.: F. M. Dostojevskij - věčný problém člověka. Praha 1992. Kautman, F.: F. X. Šalda a F. M. Dostojevskij. Praha 1968. Kautman, F.: K typologii literární kritiky a literární vědy. Praha 1996. Kautman, F.: Literatura a filosofie. Praha 1968. Krebs, H.: Paneuropa oder Mitteleuropa. Münschen 1931. Kujawa, A.: Mitteleuropa als Paradigma der Identitätssuche? Der Prosawerk von Czesław Miłosz im Kontext der Mitteleuropa-Debatte de achtziger Jahre. Wien 1997. Le Rider, J.: L’Europe Centrale – L’Idee germanique de Mitteleuropa. Paris 1994. Lemberg, H. (hrsg.): Ostmitteleuropa zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (1918-1939). Stärke und Schwäche der neuen Staaten, nationale Minderheiten. Marburg 1997. Lewis, P.: Central Europe since 1945. London and New York 1994. Lichtenberg, E. (hrsg.): Die Zukunft von Ostmitteleuropa. Vom Plan zum Markt. Wien 1991. Magris, C.: Dunaj. Praha 1992. Meyer, H. C.: Drang nach Osten. Fortunes of a Slogan-Concept in German-Slavic Relations, 1849-1990. Frankfurt am Main – New York - Paris – Wien 1996. Meyer, H. C.: Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815-1945. The Hague 1955. Pospíšil, I. - Zelenka, M.: Meziliterární společenství - meziliterárnost - meziliterární centrismy - světová literatura (Ke koncepci Ďurišinova týmu). Spoluautor Miloš Zelenka. Opera Slavica, VII, 1997, 1, 13-21. Pospíšil, I. – Zelenka, M.: Mitteleuropa als Knotenpunkt der Methodologien. Frank Wollmans Slovesnost Slovanů – Traditionen und Zusammenhänge. In: Frank Wollman: Die Literatur der Slawen. Herausgegeben von Reinhard Ibler und Ivo Pospíšil. Aus dem Tschechischen übertragen von Kristina Kallert. Vergleichende Studien zu den slavischen Sprachen und Literaturen. Herausgegeben von Renate Belentschikow und Reinhard Ibler, Bd. 7. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main – Berlin – Bern – Bruxelles – New York – Oxford – Wien 2003. Aus dem Tschechischen übersetzt von Reinhard Ibler. Pospíšil, I. - Zelenka, M.: Pojem a koncepce světové literatury. SPFFBU, 1995, D 42, Brno 1996, s. 103-112. Pospíšil, I. - Zelenka, M.: René Wellek a meziválečné Československo. Ke kořenům strukturální estetiky. Brno 1996. Pospíšil, I. – Zelenka, M.: René Wellek and Interwar Czechoslovakia: the Roots of Structural Aesthetics. BUNMEI (Civilisation) Tokyo, 17, 1998, 79-89. Pospíšil, I. – Zelenka, M.: Vdochnovljajuščaja literaturovedčeskaja koncepcija Jevgenija Ljackogo. Slavjanovedenije 1998, No. 4, 52-59. Pospíšil, I. - Zelenka, M.: Zur Kategorie des Raums in der Literaturwisseschaft. Marginalien zu einem Phänomen der mitteleuropäischen Literaturen. Germanoslavica IV (IX), 1997, 1, 179-189. Pospíšil, I. (ed.): Areál – sociální vědy – filologie. Kabinet integrované žánrové typologie, Ústav slavistiky, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Brno 2002. Pospíšil, I. (ed.): Integrovaná žánrová typologie (Komparativní genologie). Projekt – metodologie – terminologie – struktura oboru – studie. Hlavní autoři: Ivo Pospíšil – Jiří Gazda - Jan Holzer. Brno 1999. Pospíšil, I.: A Chapter from Brno Ukrainian Literary Studies: the Creative Activity of Mečislav Krhoun and His Book on Jurij Feďkovyč. In: Pagine di ucrainistica europea. A cura di Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, Giovanna Siedina. Edizioni dell’Orso, Alessandria 2001, 83-90. Pospíšil, I.: Alois Augustin Vrzal: A Catholic Vision of Slavonic Literatures. Slovak Review 1992, 2, 166-171. Pospíšil, I.: Alois Augustin Vrzal: Koncepce a dokumenty. Sborník prací filozofické fakulty brněnské univerzity, D 40, 1993, 53-62. Pospíšil, I.: Až se vyčasí... Úvahy – kritiky – glosy – eseje. Nadace Universitas Masarykiana, Nakladatelství a vydavatelství Nauma, edice Heureka, Brno 2002. Pospíšil, I.: El centrismo interliterario mediterráneo y la literatura russa. In: Literatura europea comparada. Compilación de textos César Domínguez. Arco/Libros, Madrid 2013, s. 313-322. ISBN 978-84-7635-860-3. Pospíšil, I.: Il centrismo interletterario mediterraneo e la letteratura russa. In: Il Mediterraneo. Una rete interletteraria. La Méditerranée. Un réseau interlittéraire. Stredomorie - medziliterárna sieť. A cura di Dionýz Ďurišin e Armando Gnisci. Università degli studi di Roma „La Sapienza“, Studi (e testi) italiani. Collana del Dipartimento di italianistica e spettacolo, Roma 2000, 101-109. Pospíšil, I.: In margine tzv. slovanství (Na okraj studie Miroslava Mareše Slovanství a politický extremismus v České republice). Středoevropské politické studie - Central European Political Studies Review, číslo 1, ročník iii., zima 2001, issn 1212-7817 - part 1, volume iii., winter 2001, issn 1212-7817 www.iips.cz/seps.html Pospíšil, I.: Literární věda na rozcestí. Hrst poznámek k minulosti, přítomnosti a budoucnosti. HOST 1998/2, 79-83. Pospíšil, I.: Mitteleuropa und Tschechoslowakei: Suche nach einem literaturwissenschaftlichen Kompromiss. In: Litteraria Humanitas XI. Crossroads of Cultures: Central Europe, Kreuzwege der Kulturen: Mitteleuropa, Křižovatky kultury: Střední Evropa, Perekrestki kul’tury: Srednjaja Jevropa. Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Ústav slavistiky, Brno 2002, editor: Ivo Pospíšil, s. 143-158. Pospíšil, I.: Mitteleuropäische Dimension und mitteleuropäisches Schicksal in Ota Filips konfessionelem Roman-Dokument Sedmý životopis. In: Litteraria Humanitas XI. Crossroads of Cultures: Central Europe, Kreuzwege der Kulturen: Mitteleuropa, Křižovatky kultury: Střední Evropa, Perekrestki kul’tury: Srednjaja Jevropa. Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Ústav slavistiky, Brno 2002, editor: Ivo Pospíšil, s. 305-316. Pospíšil, I.: Problémy humanitních věd a literární věda: velké krize a velká očekávání. In: Literární věda na prahu 21. století. Nauka o literaturze u progu XXI stulecia. Sborník z mezinárodní vědecké konference. Materiały z międzynarodowej konferencji naukowej. Opava 2000, ed. Libor Martinek, 42-51. Pospíšil, I.: Rasanz und Feingefühl: Zum Phänomen Mitteleuropa in der Zwischenkriegszeit. In: Litteraria Humanitas XI. Crossroads of Cultures: Central Europe, Kreuzwege der Kulturen: Mitteleuropa, Křižovatky kultury: Střední Evropa, Perekrestki kul’tury: Srednjaja Jevropa. Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Ústav slavistiky, Brno 2002, editor: Ivo Pospíšil s. 265-278. Pospíšil, I.: Sergij Vilinskij an der Masaryk-Universitat in Brunn: Fakten und Zusammenhange. Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, Bd. 42, 1996, 223-230. Pospíšil, I.: Sieben Bemerkungen zu Frank Wollmans Slovesnost Slovanů. In: Frank Wollman: Die Literatur der Slawen. Herausgegeben von Reinhard Ibler und Ivo Pospíšil. Aus dem Tschechischen übertragen von Kristina Kallert. Vergleichende Studien zu den slavischen Sprachen und Literaturen. Herausgegeben von Renate Belentschikow und Reinhard Ibler, Bd. 7. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main – Berlin – Bern – Bruxelles – New York – Oxford – Wien 2003 (aus dem Tschechischen übersetzt von Reinhard Ibler). Pospíšil, I.: Slavistika na křižovatce. Brno 2003. Pospíšil, I.: Slavistika pro třetí tisíciletí. Universitas 2000, č. 3, 9-14. Pospíšil, I.: Slavistika, komparatistika, literární věda a jejich osudová hodina. In: Studia Slavica VI. Slavistika osudem i volbou. K 75. narozeninám prof. Jiřího Damborského. Filozofická fakulta Ostravské univerzity, Uniwersytet Opolski, Ostrava 2002, s. 213-226. Pospíšil, I.: Slovanské literatury na počátku nového věku. In: K úloze Slovanů v historii a současnosti. Kolokvium u příležitosti 150. výročí Slovanského sjezdu v Praze. Emauzy - klášter Na Slovanech, 29. května 1998, Praha 1998, 34-37. Pospíšil, I.: Spálená křídla. Brno 1998. Pospíšil, I.: Srdce literatury. Alois Augustin Vrzal, 1864-1930. Brno 1993. Pospíšil, I.: Srednjaja Jevropa kak duchovnoje prostranstvo i rol’ literaturovedenija. In: Litteraria Humanitas XI. Crossroads of Cultures: Central Europe, Kreuzwege der Kulturen: Mitteleuropa, Křižovatky kultury: Střední Evropa, Perekrestki kul’tury: Srednjaja Jevropa. Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Ústav slavistiky, Brno 2002, editor: Ivo Pospíšil, s. 7-17. Pospíšil, I.: Srednjaja Jevropa kak perekrestok literaturovedčeskoj metodologii. In: Vzaimodejstvije literatur v mirovom literaturnom processe (Problemy teoretičeskoj i istoričeskoj poetiki). Materialy meždunarodnoj naučnoj konferencii, Čast’ 1, Grodnenskij gosudarstvennyj universitet imeni Janki Kupaly, Grodno 1997, 3-10. Pospíšil, I.: Střední Evropa a Slované. Masarykova univerzita, Brno 2006. Pospíšil, I.: The Danger of Loneliness: the New Splendid Isolation. In: Reinhard Ibler (Hrsg.): Von der sozialistischen zu einer marktorientierten Kultur? Ergon Verlag, Würzburg 2000, 83-96. Pospíšil, I.: Vizualizace v komplexu uměleckých detailů v románu Oty Filipa Sedmý životopis. In: Dwudziestowieczna ikonosfera w literaturach europejskich. Wizualizacja w literaturze. Pod redakcją Bożeny Tokarz, Katowice 2002, s. 299-307. Pospíšil, I.: Východoslovanské meziliterární centrismy na pozadí balkánských centrismů. Zbornik Matice srpske za slavistiku, Beograd 1994, t. 46-47, 19-27. Pospíšil, I.: Срeдняя Европа как духовноe пространство и роль литeратуровeния. In: Litteraria Humanitas XI. Crossroads of Cultures: Central Europe, Kreuzwege der Kulturen: Mitteleuropa, Křižovatky kultury: Střední Evropa, Пeрeкрeстки культуры: Срeдняя Европа. Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Ústav slavistiky, Brno 2002, editor: Ivo Pospíšil, 7-17. Revolutionen in Ostmitteleuropa 1789-1989. Schwerpunkt Ungarn. Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Karlheinz Mack. Wien 1995. Rosenberg, H.: Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit. Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik in Mitteleuropa. Berlin 1967. Rumpler, H.: Eine Chance für Mitteleuropa. Wien 1997. The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe (ed. by Karin Maag). Hants 1997. Weidenfeld, W. (hrsg.): Mittel- und Osteuropa auf dem Weg in die Europäische Union. Gütersloh 1995. Wollman, F.: Die Literatur der Slawen. Herausgegeben von Reinhard Ibler und Ivo Pospíšil. Aus dem Tschechischen übertragen von Kristina Kallert. Vergleichende Studien zu den slavischen Sprachen und Literaturen. Herausgegeben von Renate Belentschikow und Reinhard Ibler, Bd. 7. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main – Berlin – Bern – Bruxelles – New York – Oxford – Wien 2003. Wollman, F.: Duch a celistvost slovanské slovesnosti. Praha 1948. Wollman, F.: K methodologii srovnávací slovesnosti slovanské. Brno 1936. Wollman, F.: Slavismy a antislavismy za jara národů. Praha 1968. Wollman, F.: Slovesnost Slovanů. Eds. I. Pospíšil, M. Zelenka. Brno 2012. Wollman, F.: Slovesnost Slovanů. Praha 1928. Zentraleuropa, Mitteleuropa. Gemeinsamkeiten und Trennlinien. Wien 1991. Appendices Maps Austro-Hungary Bucovina/ Bukowina, a Romanian map Galicia German lands Silesia The American edition of Milan Kundera’s essay The Tragedy of Central Europe, 1986. Central Europe Programme 2020 Central Europe Programme 2020 http://www.interreg-central.eu/central-documents/programme-documents/ ________________________________ [1] See, for example: Dariusz Rott: Bracia Czescy w dawnej Polsce. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2002. Śląsk literacki. Materialy V sesji śląskoznawczej Pracowników Naukowych, Studentów i Gości Wydziału Filologiczego Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 8-9 listopada 2000. Pod red. Mariana Kisiela, Barbary Morcinek-Cudak i Tomasza M. Głogowskiego. Pallas Silesia 2001. Zbigniew Kadlubek – Dariusz Rott – Renata Ryba – Piotr Wilczek: Literatura Staropolska. Sredniowiecze – Renesans – Barok. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2002.Dariusz Rott: Leksykon przypomnień. Literatura dawnej Polski. Średniowiecze – renesans – barok. Setnik pisarzy a dzieł. Ex Libris, Warszawa 2002. Viz naše recenze: Různé aspekty ikonosféry (Krystyna Kossakowska-Jarosz: Śląsk znany. Śląsk nie znany. O kulturze literackiej na Górnym Śląsku przed pierwszym progiem umasowienia. Uniwersytet Opolski, Opole 1999. Dwudziestowieczna ikonosfera w literaturach europejskich: Wizualizacja w literaturze. Pod redakcją Bożeny Tokarz. „Śląsk“, Katowice 2002. Dariusz Rott: Bracia czescy v dawnej Polsce. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2002). Slavica Litteraria, X 6, 2003, pp. 187-188. Slezská poezie v kulturním proudění věků (Zbigniew Kadłubek – Dariusz Rott: Oczy Charibelli. Ślady petrarkizmu w siedemnastowiecznej łacińskiej poezji śląskiej. Biblioteka fundacji „Pallas Silesia“. Redaktor serii: Dariusz Rott. Katowice – Pszczyna 2004. Frank Wedekind: Trost. Pocieszenie. Wybór poezji. Ausgewählte Dichtungen. Przekład i opracowanie Teresa Kowalska. Biblioteka fundacji „Pallas Silesia“. Redaktor: Dariusz Rott. Katowice 2004). Slavica Litteraria, X 8, 2005, pp. 226-227. Viz naši stať Próza virtuální autenticity a existenciálního znejistění. SPFFBU, X 10, Slavica Litteraria, pp. 5-20. [2] See our studies from the volume Dialog kultur: My a oni: ve středu i na okraji. Poznámky k česko-ruským literárním vztahům. In: Dialog kultur I. Sborník příspěvků z odborného semináře – Hradec Králové 14. 11. 2001, katedra slavistiky, Pedagogická fakulta, Univerzita Hradec Králové, OFTIS, Ústí nad Orlicí 2002, pp. 13-39. Několik úvah o dialogu obecně a o dialogu kultur zvláště a o jejich místě v literární vědě. In: Dialog kultur II. Sborník příspěvků z vědecké konference s mezinárodní účastí pořádané ve spolupráci se Společností Franka Wollmana při FF MU v Brně, Hradec Králové 12. 11. 2002, Ústí nad Orlicí 2003, uspořádal Oldřich Richterek, pp. 7-19. Kulturní dialog a areálová studia (několik poznámek o spojitosti pojmů). Dialog kultur III. Sborník příspěvků z vědecké konference s mezinárodní účastí pořadáné ve spolupráci se Společností Franka Wollmana při FF MU v Brně a Českou asociací rusistů. Hradec Králové 26. 10. 2004. Oftis, Ústí nad Orlicí 2005, pp. 17-24. Dialog kultur v Hradci Králové jako tichá výzva. In: Dialog kultur IV. Sborník příspěvků z mezinárodní vědecké konference pořádané ve spolupráci se Slavistickou společností FrankaWollmana při FF MU v Brně a Českou asociací rusistů. Hradec Králové 23.-24. 1. 2007. Uspořádal Oldřich Richterek. Oftis, Ústí nad Orlicí 2007, p. 9. Trivialita a hledání virtuální autenticity jako nového dialogu. In: Dialog kultur IV. Sborník příspěvků z mezinárodní vědecké konference pořádané ve spolupráci se Slavistickou společností FrankaWollmana při FF MU v Brně a Českou asociací rusistů. Hradec Králové 23.-24. 1. 2007. Ed. Oldřich Richterek. Oftis, Ústí nad Orlicí 2007, pp. 21-27. [3] See I. Pospíšil: Teoretická konstrukce a naplněnost kontextu (In margine „nové západní literárněvědné rusistiky“). Opera Slavica 2006, 3, pp. 31-36. Z. Mathauser: Báseň na dosah eidosu. Ke stopám fenomenologie v ruské literatuře a literární vědě. Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Praha 2005. See further in: Literatura a filozofie (Zdeněk Mathauser). Kolektivní monografie. Eds: Ivo Pospíšil, Jan Zouhar. Katedra filosofie, Ústav slavistiky FF MU, Brno 2008. See our reflections Hodnoty a hodnocení znovu v kurzu (Literatura w kręgu wartości. Materialy z VI sesji z cyklu „Świat jeden, ale nie jednolity“. Bydgoszcz 21-23 października 2002 roku. Pod redakcją i ze wstępem Lidii Wiśniewskiej. Bydcoszcz 2003). Opera Slavica XIV., 2004, 3, pp. 51-52. Hodnoty a literatura. Universitas 1988, 5, pp. 16-22. Hodnoty a rovnost v literatuře. Dvě knihy a jejich inspirativní hodnota. Studia Balcanica Bohemo-Slovaca VI, vol. 2, Sekce literárněvědná a kulturologická. Sekce jazykovědná. Příspěvky prezentované na VI. mezinárodním balkanistickém sympoziu v Brně ve dnech 25.-27. dubna 2005. K vydání připravili Pavel Boček, Ladislav Hladký, Pavel Krejčí, Petr Stehlík a Václav Štěpánek. Red.: Václav Štěpánek. Ústav slavistiky FF MU, Historický ústav AV ČR, Matice moravská, Brno 2006, pp. 757-767. Hodnoty, hodnocení a souvislosti v literární historii: ruská literatura v zrcadle několika přehledových a slovníkových kompendií a v pojetí českého Slovníku ruských, ukrajinských a běloruských spisovatelů. In: Philologica LVII, Univerzita Komenského, Bratislava 2003, pp. 211-221. The Problem of Value and Equality in Comparative Literary Studies: the Past and the Present (Some Comments on the Conception of „Area Value“). In: The Horizons of Comtemporary Slavic Comparative Literature Studies. Ed. by Halina Janaszek-Ivaničková. Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, Warszawa 2007, pp. 39-49. John Neubauer, Marcel Cornis-Pope (eds): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. I–III. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004–2007. In complex see our book Ruský román znovu navštívený. Historie, uzlové body vývoje, teorie a mezinárodní souvislosti: Od počátků k výhledu do současnosti. Ed.: Jaroslav Malina, obálka, grafická a typografická úprava Josef Zeman – Tomáš Mořkovský, Martin Čuta, ilustrace Boris Jirků. Nadace Universitas, Edice Scientia, Akademické nakladatelství CERM v Brně, Nakladatelství a vydavatelství NAUMA v Brně, Brno 2005. I. Pospíšil: Sedmero úskalí a inspirací. Slovenská literatúra 1993, 4, pp. 292-295. [4] R. Wellek, A. Warren: Theory of Literature. Penguin Books, London 1968 (originally Harcourt, Brace, and Comp. 1948). [5] See I. Pospíšil: Střední Evropa a Slované (Problémy a osobnosti). Ústav slavistiky Filozofické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity, Brno 2006, 246 pp. [6] The abridged version of the following study, see I. Pospíšil: The Problem of Works of a Great World Literature in the Role of a Minority Literature in the Context of a Smaller Majority Literature (The Case Study in Ljuba Vondroušková‘s Poetic Creation). Minority Culture in Central Europe. Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa, Fakulta stredoeurópskych štúdií, Ústav stredoeurópskych jazykov a kultúr. Eds: Agnieszka Janiec-Nyitrai, Zuzana Vargová, Nitra 2012, p. 115-131. ISBN 978-80-558-0147-6. [7] See Ruský hlas v Brně, Rovnost, 19. 7. 1994, p. 7. [8] See Neřeďte lásku, in: Любовь Вондроушкова: Zrcadlení – Зеркальное отражение. Přeložila Taťána Kuxová. Brno 2003, с. 4-5; Rozhovor s překladatelkou Taťánou Kuxovou, in: Любовь Вондроушкова: Zrcadlení – Зеркальное отражение. Přeložila Taťána Kuxová. Brno 2003, pp. 64-69. [9] I. Pospíšil: Ruské nebe na moravské zemi. In: Любовь Вондроушкова: Zrcadlení /Зеркальное отражение 2, Brno 2004, přel. Taťána Kuxová, pp. 4-9. [10] Jindra Lírová (Йиндра Лирова): Дождь памяти. Брно 2006. [11] Ян Скацел: Немой сезон. Брно 2005. Перевод Л. Вондроушкова‚ об авторе Дора Капралова‚ иллюстрации О. Плхова. [12] Любовь Вондроушкова: Любимое. Mia ŝato. Brno 2008. Из эсперанто перевел Ярослав Кролуппер. Esperantigis Jaroslav Krolupper. Любовь Вондроушкова: Лабиринт. Labirinto. Brno 2009. Из эсперанто перевел Ярослав Кролуппер. Esperantigis Jaroslav Krolupper. Любовь Вондроушкова: Иллюзия. Iluzio. Brno 2010. Из эсперанто перевел Ярослав Кролуппер. Esperantigis Jaroslav Krolupper. Our epilogue called in Czech Na tváři lehký smích… was published in three languages (Russian, Esperanto, and Czech, pp. 56-58). [13] The dissertation can be found in the archives of the dissertations of the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University: http://is.muni.cz/th/282298/ff_d/. [14] F. Kautman: O českou národní identitu. Pulchra, edice Testis, Praha 2015. [15] See Claudio Magris: Danubio. Garzanti, Milano 1986. The Czech translation C. M.: Dunaj. Odeon, Praha 1992, Mladá fronta 2010. [16] I. Pospíšil – M. Zelenka: René Wellek a meziválečné Československo. Ke kořenům strukturální estetiky. Masarykova univerzita, Brno 1996. [17] See Dobromila Lebrová: František Xaver Svoboda, spisovatel http://www.pozitivni-noviny.cz/cz/clanek-2010100061, 20. 10. 2010, 17:26. [18] “F. X. Svoboda’s name isn’t well-known to today’s readers. Maybe it’s a result of the fact that he dealt with the themes which the Communist period didn’t favour. These were the stories about middle class and rural people. So, he, as well as many other authors, who had been read so much that they were buried at famous Slavín cemetery is hardly known by name. But in his own time he was greatly admired. Today we can watch his film Poslední muž (The Last Man) with the famous Czech comic actor Jaroslav Marvan playing the leading part. The film is Svoboda’s cinematized comedy of the same name. This comedy is still in repertory of amateur theatres. The same happened with the film with Oldřich Nový and Nataša Gollová Roztomilý člověk (A Charming Man) based on Svoboda’s comedy Kašpárek (A Clown). He was a writer who used various literary forms – from poetry, a story and a novel to dramatic works” (see: Dobromila Lebrová: František Xaver Svoboda, spisovatel http://www.pozitivni-noviny.cz/cz/clanek-2010100061), quot. 5. 10. 2010. [19] R. Pynsent: Julius Zeyer: The Path to Decadence. Mouton, Hague 1973. See also his monograph Pátrání po identitě. H&H, Jinočany 1996, and Ďáblové, ženy a národ. Výbor z úvah o české literatuře. Karolinum, Praha 2008 (orig. Devils, Women and Nation: Essays on Czech Literature), especially a study called K morfologii české dekadence (Interstatualita). [20] It is demonstrated in many of our studies, i.a.: Povaha a vývoj ruského románu (Nástin problematiky). SPFFBU, XLV, D 43, 1996, s. 53-66, Paradoxes of Genre Evolution: the 19^th-Century Russian Novel. Zagadnienia rodzajów literackich, tom XLII, zeszyt 1-2 (83-84), Łódź 1999, s. 25-47, then in the monograph Ruský román znovu navštívený. Historie, uzlové body vývoje, teorie a mezinárodní souvislosti: Od počátků k výhledu do současnosti. Ed.: Jaroslav Malina, obálka, grafická a typografická úprava Josef Zeman – Tomáš Mořkovský, Martin Čuta, ilustrace Boris Jirků. Nadace Universitas, Edice Scientia, Akademické nakladatelství CERM v Brně, Nakladatelství a vydavatelství NAUMA v Brně, Brno 2005. [21] See our studies and monographs which are referred to in other publications: Ruská románová kronika (Příspěvek k historii a teorii žánru). Brno 1983. Labyrint kroniky. Pokus o teoretické vymezení žánru. Blok, Brno 1986. Kronikální lokalita: tradice a současnost. In: Cesty k dnešku. Živé podněty a tradice ruské a sovětské literatury. Univerzita Karlova, Praha 1983, pp. 241-253. Koncepce prostoru a času v kronikách N. S. Leskova. SPFF BU, 1976, D 23-24, pp. 109-117. Genologické pojmy a žánrové hranice (problém tzv. románové kroniky). Slavia 1981, 3-4, pp. 381-389. Syžet ruské románové kroniky (problematika titulu, syžetu, incipitu a explicitu). Čs. rusistika 1982, 1, pp. 16-21. Ruská románová kronika a utilitarismus. Čs. rusistika 1982, 3, pp. 114-119. Románová kronika a socialistická literatura. Slavia 1983, 2, pp. 131-139. Vývojové fáze kroniky ve slovanských literaturách, Slavia 1984, 3-4, pp. 349-357. Tvar a funkce metarománu. Světová literatura 1984, 3, pp. 251-253. Sujetkausalität und Romanchronik. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 1984, 3, pp. 421-434. Románová kronika jako žánrové východisko, SPFF BU, D 31, 1984, pp. 49-56. Idyla, elegie, kronika a moderní literatura. SPFF BU, D 32, 1985, pp. 197-201. Stabilita kronikového vidění světa. Česká literatura 1988, 2, pp. 97-108. Prameny ruské románové kroniky: A. S. Puškin a S. T. Aksakov. Slavica Slovaca 1990, 4, pp. 312-321. Powieść-kronika. Zagadnienia rodzajów literackich, z. 1 (65), t. XXXIII, pp. 121-125. Josef Suchý mezi idylou, elegií a kronikou. In: Černá a bílá pravda. Josef Suchý (1923-2003). SvN Regiony, Brno 2004, pp. 21-28. Moderní (románová) kronika jako umělecká forma. In: Filolohični seminary. Chudožnja forma, vypusk 8. Kyjivs’kyj Nacional’nyj Universytet imeni Tarasa Ševčenka, Kyjiv 2005, pp. 68-74. Powieść-kronika, heslo in: Słównik rodzajów i gatunków literackich, pod redakcją Grzegorza Gazdy i Słowini Tyneckiej-Makowskiej. Universitas, Kraków 2006, pp. 572-575 (translated by Krystyna Kardyni-Pelikánová). Роман в новеллах и роман-хроника (Заметки о дифференциации русского советского романа). Ruský jazyk 1981, 2, pp. 49-54. Смысл и контекст жанровой конвергенции мифа и хроники. Zagadnienia rodzajów literackich 1992, 2, 69-77. А. М. Грачева: „Семейные хроники“ начала XX века. Русская литература 1982, 1, s. 64-76. А. М. Грачева: Алексей Ремизов и древнерусская культура. Studiorum Slavicorum Monumenta, tomus 19, Российская Академия Наук‚ Институт русской литературы (Пушкинский Дом). С.-Петербург 2000. Danuta Szymonik: Rosyjska powieść rodzinna srebrnego wieku. Wydawnictwo Universytetu Marii Curie Skłodowskiej, Lublin 2003. [22] See also our studies Man’ Fate in Space and Time (The Modifications of the Chronicle Model in N. S. Leskov and K. V. Rais). Opera Slavica 1991, 1, s. 44-49 .„Staré časy“ ve výstavbě žánru (Nikolaj Semjonovič Leskov - Svetozár Hurban Vajanský - Vladislav Vančura), in: I. Pospíšil: Genologie a proměny literatury. Brno 1998. [23] See our books: Ruská románová kronika, Brno 1983; Labyrint kroniky, Brno 1986; Genologie a proměny literatury. Brno 1998. [24] Labyrint kroniky, p. 20-21. [25] Ruská románová kronika, p. 29. [26] V. Jirát: Erben čili Majestát zákona. Jaroslav Podroužek, Praha 1944. [27] J. L. Sammons: The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or: What Happened to Wilhelm Meister’s Legacy? Genre, vol. XIV, s. 2, Summer 1981, pp. 229-246. [28] See Neubauer, J., Cornis-Pope, M., eds (2004-2007): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, sv. 1–3, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. See our studies on these problems: Problema slavizmov i njegov kontekst. Primerjalna književnost, december 2005, 2, pp. 17-32. Primerjalna književnost, srednjeevropski kulturni prostor in teorija literarne zgodovine. Primerjalna književnost 31.2 2008, pp. 137-148. ISSN 0351-1189. The Permanent Crisis, Or Can, Could or Should Comparative Literary Studies Survive? Between History, Theory and Area Studies. World Literature Studies, vol. 1(18) 2009, pp. 50-61. Prostorovost/spaciálnost/areálovost a literatura. World Literature Studies, vol. 2 (19) 2010, pp. 61-73. ISSN 1337-9690, 1337-9275. [29] Aleksandr Lappo-Danilevskij: Politische Ideen in Rußland des 18. Jahrhunderts. История политических идей в России в XVIII веке в свзяи с общим ходом развития культуры и политики. Bausteine zur slavischen Philologie und Kulturgeschichte, Neue Folge, Bd. 1. Предисловие М. Ю Сорокиной. Подготовка текста М. Ю. Сорокиной при участии К. Ю. Лаппо-Данилевского. Böhlau Verlag, Köln – Weimar - Wien 2005). See also our review: Potřebná edice o ruském myšlení, Slavica Litteraria, X 9, 2006, s. 326-327. [30] See also literary work of A. A. Hansen-Löve about Russian symbolism Der russische Symbolismus (1-4, 1984) and Russische Symbolismus 2. Mythopoetischer Symbolismus 1. Kosmische Symbolik (1999) and their Russian collections from the year 1999 and 2003 (Russkij simvolizm. Sistema poetičeskich motivov. Sankt-Peterburg 1999; Simvolizm 2. Mifopoetičeskij simvolizm načala veka. Kosmičeskaja simvolika. S.-Peterburg 2003). [31] See our works: Syntetická metodologie Apollona Grigorjeva. SPFFBU, D 36-37, 1989-1990, s. 57-66. „Stydlivost“ tvorby (Apollon Grigorjev, kreativní autoreflexe a vývojové vplývání ruské literatury. In: Litteraria Humanitas IX, Cesta k duši díla - Miroslav Mikulášek - Brno 2001, s. 31-39. Avtorefleksija/avtoaksiologija tvorčestva i odna tradicija russkoj estetičeskoj mysli. In: Mirgorod. Žurnal, posvjačennyj voprosam epistemologii literaturovedenije. Akademia Podlaska, Université de Lausanne, Section de langues et civilisations slaves, 2010, No. 2, s. 203-210. [32] I. Pospíšil: Man’s Fate in Space and in Time (The Modifications of the Chronicle Model in N. S. Leskov and K. V. Rais). Opera Slavica 1991, 1, pp. 44-49. The Hidden Kernel of Paradox: the Chronicles of Anthony Trollope and Nikolai Leskov. Germanoslavica. Zeitschrift für germano-slawische Studien, VII (XII), 2000, Nr. 1, pp. 35-40. K typu autorské osobnosti v ruské literatuře (N. S. Leskov a A. M. Remizov). In: Umění teorie a Zdeněk Mathauser. Slavia, Slovanský ústav, Euroslavica 2000, pp. 419-425. „The Old Times“ and the Genre Forms: An Interpretative Triangle. Opera Slavica IV, 1994, č. 1, pp. 39-45. [33] See our Czech translation and notes: Nikolaj Berďajev: Duše Ruska, Brno 1992; Nikolaj Berďajev: Filosofie lidského osudu. Fragmenty z knihy Smysl dějin. Zvláštní vydání, Brno 1994; further see our studies: Šílenství jako etické gesto. Etika, Brno, 1992, 2, pp. 80-87. Spravedlnost Krista a Velikého Inkvizitora u Nikolaje Berďajeva. Etika, Brno, 1992, č. 3, pp. 37-42. [34] Řeka, 1, J. R.Vilímek, Praha 1903-1905, pp. 52-53. [35] Řeka, 1, 1903-1905, p. 81. [36] Řeka, 1., pp. 295-296. [37] Řeka, 1., p. 299. [38] Řeka, 2, 1903-1905, p. 293. [39] Řeka, 2, 1903-1905, pp. 210-211. [40] Řeka, 3, 1903-1905, pp. 69-70. [41] Řeka, 4,1903-1905, p. 15. [42] Řeka, 4, 1903-1905, p. 55. [43] Řeka, 4, 1903-1905, p. 113. [44] Řeka, 4, 1903-1905, p. 140. [45] Řeka, 4, 1903-1905, p. 163. [46] Rozkvět, 1, 1893-1895, p. 261 (Nakladatel Jos. R. Vilímek, Spálená ulice 13 n.).