"С елените и дунавските лебеди": история и колективна психика
"With the Deer and Swans of the Danube": History and Psyche

Czech Manuscripts of Zelená hora and Hradec králové as seen by Edgar Quinet

Author(s): Xavier Galmiche
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Comparative Study of Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Пловдивски университет »Паисий Хилендарски«
Keywords: Manuscripts; reception; France; historiography; comparative literature; Edgar Quinet; Giambattista Vico; Johann Gottfried von Herder; Claude Fauriel
Summary/Abstract: Released in 1817 and 1818, the Manuscripts of Zelená Hora and Hradec Králové in Bohemia are part of the literary mystifications whose vogue spread across Europe from the end of the eighteenth century. They remain until today the most often pre sented among the Czech literary corpus: this exceptional reception extends for over a hundred and fifty years. Among the philologists and scholars who first devoted texts of modest but decisive scope to them, the French poet and Romantic thinker Edgar Quinet brings a comparative perspective in his article “From the Epic of the Bohemi ans” (1831). This essay proposes to read this early chapter of the French reception of modern Czech literature as an example of historiography based on analogy and empa thy. It is indeed possible to understand these early analyses in the context of the “pre history” of French comparative literature, philosophically influenced by Vico, Herder and the French Ideologues and initiated by Claude Fauriel, but also in a subjective understanding of the history in which Quinet includes his own experience of the Napo leonic wars: an individual and collective psychoanalysis?

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