Confiteor - konec romantismu
Machar’s Confiteor: The End of Romanticism

Summary/Abstract: The article is concerned with Confiteor (1887), the first collection of verse by Josef Svatopluk Machar (1864–1942). It places him in the concerns of 1890s literature and analyzes the nature of the persona and irony, both of which are unique in the Czech verse of his day. Machar’s approach to the Romantic is ambivalent. On the one hand he exhibits the Romantic tradition; on the other, the Romantic is absent or consistently ironized. This approach is linked with his fear of metaphysical questions and his evident questioning of the status of poetry merely on a sociological level. The author’s interpretation constitutes a return to assessing the aesthetic value of the literary text; at the same time it considers the problem of Machar as founder of Czech Modernism. In so doing, she looks at continuities between Romanticism and Modernism.

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