Obrazy ze života mezi ironií a snem. Máchova Marinka a kontury protorealismu v polovině 30. let 19. století
„Pictures from Life“ between irony and dream (Mácha’s Marinka and contours of the Protorealism in the half of the 1830s)

Summary/Abstract: In the half of the 1830s the communication principles in the Czech language literary space underwent changes, as this space widened and differentiated in the competition of the parallel discourses – namely, fading away Classicism, strong entrance of the Romanticism and first realistic tendencies. It is just the genre of the „picture from life“ that enables us to distinctly perceive this dynamics: from its transfer to the Czech culture, i. e. the process of establishing and forming distinct variants in the frame of the mentioned discourses. Originally a journalistic genre, the „picture from life“ became popular belletristic form, substitute, in some measure, for the prestigious prosaic genres the story and the novel. It usually covered a short time period, was set in a clearly defined space determined by topographical motifs and it used first person narration by the autobiographical or the personal narrator. Mácha in his unfinished cycle Pictures from My Life led a dialogue with this trend, with his „Marinka“ standing in the middle of the literary field of the texts published in magazines in 1834–1835, which thematically and in language structure fulfill and modify the literary conventions of the „picture from life“ and reader expectations. At the same time, Marinka is its ironic „contrafactura“, which brought about one of the first controversies traditionally interpreted as the crystallization of the Romantic discourse. However, the controversy itself is rather an illustration of the parallel coexistence of several discourses and their mutual interaction, and thus an evidence of the possibility of penetrating literary methods, specific for different discourses, in one and the same literary work of art.

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