Galerií literárních krajin Viléma Mrštíka
‘In the Gallery of Vilém Mrštík’s Literary Landscapes’

Summary/Abstract: The article ‘The Gallery of Vilém Mrštík’s Literary Landscapes’ explores the role landscape plays in the works of Vilém Mrštík (1863–1912). Rather than describing its development, the author aims to identify and analyse the ways in which landscape is shaped in a variety of genres, including Mrštík’s published notes and observations, his shorter prose, travel writing, and novels with urban and rural landscapes. On the one hand, literary landscape, regardless of the text, inevitably results from the view through which an observer (the author, narrator, or a character) relates himself or herself to the section of the world which he or she observes, and its boundaries are delimited only by the reader’s image of the landscape – be it a landscape anchored in a minimum of constitutive features, disintegrating into discontinuous natural or urban phenomena, or a landscape transformed through the loss of perspective into an environment; on the other hand, the final picture of a literary landscape, including the meanings it is endowed with, is usually determined by the function of the particular text, varying with genre. The article also draws attention to some of Mrštík’s overlooked works, and offers a fresh view of the popular novels Santa Lucia (1893) and Pohádka máje (A May fairy tale, 1897), whose place in Czech literary history seemed to the author to be too settled and suffering from the lack of impulses for new interpretation. Aiming to see Mrštík’s works through contemporary eyes, the article finds inspiration in the current endeavour to renew sensitivity towards (non-)human nature: lyrical art, which the author often prefers to the construction of a story, enables a sensitive reader to perceive natural or urban environments without the ‘distractions’ created by an extensive plot.

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