The interpretation of Božena Němcová’s letters: the linguistic picture of the world and image schemas

Author(s): Lucie Saicová Římalová / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2015

The article presents the theory of the linguistic picture of the world and the theory of image schemas and discusses their role in the interpretation of “older” literature. The problem is illustrated using letters written by and to B. Němcová, a nineteenth-century Czech female writer. The text attempts to demonstrate that the two aspects play different roles in different writer-reader configurations – in the context of the original epistolary communication, when the texts are read by nineteenth-century readers who were not the intended addresses, and when they are interpreted by a contemporary reader.

Hrabalovo estetické a etické tázání

Author(s): Hana Voisine-Jechová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 46/2014

This essay is concerned with Hrabal’s attitude to great writers of the twentieth century and their views the suther of the essay compares and contrasts Hrabal’s works with the works of Jaroslav Durych (1886–1962), which are based on a Christian outlook, in particular Boží duha (The iris of God, 1969). Apart from that, she typologically puts Hrabal’s work in a category with some of the fiction of VladislavVančura (1981–1942) and Karel Schulz (1988–1943). She perceives a certain parallel in the dreaminess of the Surrealist leading of the narration, and demonstrates this feature by discussing Durych’s Bloudění (Wandering, 1929; published in English as The Descent of the Idol, 1936), Vančura’sMarkéta Lazarová (1931), and Schulz’s Kámen a bolest (Stone and pain, 1942). The second part of the essay considers the outsider, a typical theme of twentieth-century fiction.Here appears the thesis, which the author finds doubtful, about the relationship between Hrabal’s characters and Camus’s themes of alienation and guilt. The essay concludes by stating that Hrabal as an author is both a Naturalist and a Surrealist.

Obrazárna

Author(s): Karel Kolařík / Language(s): Czech Issue: 46/2014

This article first introduces the reader to the topic of the aestheticism of Decadent Symbolism by outlining the theatricality of the nineteenth century. It describes Aestheticism as a path to a new authenticity and therefore also to ethics, with the aim of transforming life into a work of art, subordinated to the ideal of beauty. It then discusses Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s (1871–1951) strategies of auto-stylization, particularly his desire to live ambivalently, and thus multiply and vary his appearance. At the same time, the article supports this endeavour with analyses of Karásek’s use of intertextuality and a carefully planned strategy of communication in his literature. It interprets Karásek’s gallery as a monument to its founder, providing information (as do his works of literature and other activity) about his personality, and it analyses two levels of the collection in detail, providing a picture of him and his impenetrable multiplicity of faces – namely, a set of books containing dedications to Karásek and a collection of his portraits by various painters.

Svědectví před Ohnicí: edice úvodníku nerealizovaného periodika z roku 1946

Author(s): Jan Bílek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 46/2014

This article puts the manuscript (from an archive edition) of the leading article of the unpublished 1946 periodical, Svědectví (Testimony), into its historical context. The article describes efforts to create a platform for a wider group of people active in the arts, for example, František Kovárna (1905–1952) and Jan Patočka (1907–1977), but mainly for Kamil Bednář’s (1912–1972) group of writers, including Jaroslav Červinka (1918–1998) and Zdeněk Urbánek (1917–2008), and it identifies the main trend of their reflections.

Máchův relikviář dnes

Author(s): Yvetta Dörflová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 47/2015

The article is preceded by an edition of a now hard-to-find article by the Czech writer Emanuel Lešehrad (1877–1955), ‘Máchův relikviář’ (Mácha’s reliquary), which describes his approach to collecting documents and souvenirs from the estate of Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–1836). The accompanying essay includes descriptions of the archive materials that he got from this estate. It is the first publication of maps that Lešehrad bought from Mácha’s nephew Václav Mácha. By comparing places that Mácha visited with notes and points drawn on the maps, the author of the article seeks to determine whether they truly did belong to Mácha. She also point out other documents that have previously slipped the attention of Mácha scholars, concerning both the life of Mácha (a vaccination certificate and a school report) and the life of his father.

Dočasní generační přátelé: kritik Jaroslav Červinka a básník Jan Pilař

Author(s): Jan Bílek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 47/2015

The article, entitled ‘Temporary friends of one generation: The critic Jaroslav Červinka (1918–1998) and the poet Jan Pilař (1917–1996)’, discusses the birth, course, and end of the friendship of these two men, which lasted from 1936 to 1943. It touches upon their family backgrounds and other important aspects of their lives. In the area of literature, it focuses on their relationship with the writers’ group of Kamil Bednář (1912–1972). The context is the period from the late 1930s to the late 1940s.

Dětský časopis Punťa – cesta k úspěchu

Author(s): Lucie Kořínková,Pavel Kořínek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 48/2016

In this article the two authors focus on the magazine Punťa, which was published from 1935 to 1942 (as a monthly, beginning in 1936, and then twice monthly beginning in 1939). Punťa has been largely neglected by scholars, yet in its days it was a highly popular and inluential magazine, comparable in its success to the later far more researched magazine Mladý hlasatel (Young Herald). In this article the authors propose answers to the questions of why and how Punťa achieved this success amongst magazines for readers between 6 and 12 years of age. They examine in particular the marketing strategies of the Rodina publishing house, which produced the magazine. They look primarily at phenomena that may relate to contemporary trends – namely, a fascination for the medium of ilm, the cult of celebrity, and the beginnings of merchandising, in recognizing children as an important market to whom they could ofer goods and entertainment. They also consider international contexts and analogies in the area of entertainment and magazines for children.

Ke způsobu literárního ztvárnění „podivuhodných pověstí ze staré Prahy“

Author(s): Jana Čeňková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 48/2016

This article identiies the fundamental features of the subgenre of popular legend and the creation of the first conversion of nineteenth-century Prague legends into belles-lettres, including sippurim, Alois Jirásek (1851–1930), Josef Svátek (1835–1897), and Augustin Sedláček (1843–1926). These fundamental collections of Prague legends return to the magical, fantasy setting as it afected the various peoples living in the country. Of these Prague Jewish texts it then analyses the Golem story in various literary adaptations, in words and pictures, for example, by Václav Cibula (1925–2009), Leo Pavlát (b. 1950), and Petr/Peter Sís (b. 1949). The thought-provoking multi-ethnic mystery of the Prague milieu also appears in the form of Faustus legends, of which the author chooses works by Eduard Petiška (1924–1987) and Alena Ježková (b. 1966) as examples of adaptations for children and young adults.

František Hrnčíř a svět jeho pohádek pro děti a mládež

Author(s): Karel Rýdl / Language(s): Czech Issue: 48/2016

This article presents an analysis of the fairy tales of František Hrnčíř (1860–1928), together with a sketch of the life of this half-forgotten writer of literature for children and young adults. he author analyses the form and content of Hrnčíř’s inventive fairy tales, taking into account their artistic, educational, and social aspects. It is accompanied by photographs and samples of fairy tales that, although little known now, were in their day, in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, highly popular. Most were published by Hrnčíř in the town of Nymburk, central Bohemia, at his own expense.

Dívčí romány na konci dlouhého 19. století a genderové stereotypy v nich

Author(s): Lenka Křížová,Lenka Procházková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 48/2016

Collections of congratulatory poems but also brief prose speeches became highly popular in the nineteenth century. A considerable number were published and republished. Most of them were intended for children and young people, to whom social convention ascribed a clearly deined role in domestic and school celebrations. At the expense of originality and regardless of the age of the reciter or writers, however, the accent in these texts was mainly on the established form of speeches at celebrations and their educational impact. These collections of congratulations then necessarily tended to become teaching aids and social manuals rather than collections of verse, even though congratulations in verse corresponded in many respects to contemporary poetry for children and young adults.

Obrazová příloha I

Author(s): / Language(s): Czech Issue: 48/2016

Strategie a perspektivy českých nakladatelství literatury pro děti a mládež po roce 2000 s přihlédnutím k problematice e-knih

Author(s): Radek Malý / Language(s): Czech Issue: 48/2016

In this article the author discusses the current state of the publishing of children’s books in the Czech Republic, which has resulted from the intersection of several remarkable trends: an inclination to the ‘all-age book’ (the book as a fine-art artefact with no clear target age group); the emphasis on the artistic and interactive conception of the book; and a tendency to intermediality. The author discusses the most important Czech proponents of such books, particularly Petr Nikl, and small publishers in the Czech Republic, like Meander and Baobab, in comparison with the huge Albatros Media publishing concern. He also comments on Czech e-books for children and the roots of Czech publishers’ rather conservative approach to this form.

Don Pablo, don Pedro a Božena Benešová

Author(s): Dobrava Moldanová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 48/2016

This article discusses the short novel Don Pablo, don Pedro a Věra Lukášová (D.P., D.P., and V.L.), the last and most popular work of the Czech prose writer Božena Benešová (1873–1936). It also discusses the magazine Eva, in which the novel appeared in instalments. Eva, published twice a month from 1928 to 1943, was intended for the educated modern woman, and in interwar Czechoslovakia it advocated a new way of life, the essence of which was positive thinking and activity. Though Benešová was of diferent generation from the people who started up the magazine, her work expressed the same attitude towards life: the need to show courage in adversity and to part ways with the prejudices and conventions of the years before the First World War. On the other hand, the conception of the child hero in Benešová’s work follows on from the pre-1914 discovery of the child as a character in Czech literature, particularly in the works of Růžena Svobodová (1868–1920) and Benešová herself. Unlike the pre-1914 iction, all of which have grim endings, this last story of Benešová’s is optimistic, and in that sense its well with the conception of Eva.

Obrazová příloha II

Author(s): / Language(s): Czech Issue: 48/2016

LEXIKÁLNÍ PROSTŘEDKY A STYL NOVÉ ČESKÉ LITERATURY

Author(s): Petr Mareš / Language(s): Czech Issue: XXVI/2017

The paper deals with the complexity of stylistic markers of words and with the employment of these markers for aesthetic purposes and effects in several works of modern Czech literature. There is a distinctive tendency in the Czech prose to combine lexical devices with dissimilar, often antagonistic stylistic markers (formal and colloquial, archaic and new, polite and vulgar etc.). The main part of the paper includes short analyses of selected texts that operate with lexical devices in such a way. In 1920s, Vladislav Vanèura was a pioneer of this stylistic technique. In the last decades, novels and short stories by Ota Pavel, Jiøí Gruša or Petra Hùlová represent outstanding examples of achieving significant effects by contrasting words with antagonistic stylistic markers.

SHODNÝ ATRIBUT V SOUČASNÝCH ČESKÝCH ODBORNÝCH TEXTECH

Author(s): Martin Schacherl / Language(s): Czech Issue: XXVI/2017

One of the devices to enliven the stylisation of professional expression is the attributive adjective, which as a stylistically active means contains functional elements intentionally debilitating to the basic features of scientific style, namely an explicit endeavour to subjectivise the authorial assessment, or possibly to make the stylisation of professional discourse more distinct. The frequency analyses of the contemporary corpus of scientific communication written in Czech has evidenced an abundant occurrence of the attributive adjective, mainly in the humanities and social sciences. There the attributive adjective is a means of subjectivised authorial assessment, fulfilling the intention of indirect or even metaphorical appellation, most frequently through confrontation of two components from different communicational spheres, or conveying vagueness, inaccuracy and relative values, itself being loaded with expressive marker. The fixedness of some profusely used collocations reduces the notionality of expression and, namely in monographs produced in humanities and social sciences where its occurrence is high, it may become a stereotype of cliché-ridden and trendy expression. Clichéd communication is typified by using hackneyed meaningless words, with the authorial scientific diction being permeated by clichés, hackneyed and empty phrases, and vogue expressions from various communicational spheres.

NIECHCIANA RELACJA Z CZESKICH OBOZÓW PRACY – TWÓRCZOOŚĆ KARELA PECKI

Author(s): Dorota Bielec / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2017

The article is devoted to interpretation of the autobiographical novels by Karel Pecka.The author took on the role of a spokesman of the generation of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia, or at least this part of it which was inherited by a similar fate. Using fiction, the author wants to convey that this is not the only one – Karel Pecka, who was a victim of the nineteen-fifties, but there were many like him. The moral message of Pecka’s novels is very firm, because it appears to be not a result of thinking individuals, but an outcome of part of society. He constructs his novels in such a way that the main character is always in a situation in which they must make a choice, and this is, in a sense, the ultimate choice. This kind of reflection certainly was not convenient for the communist authorities, the writer’s attitude caused his exclusion from theCzechoslovak official literary life.

JIŘÍ SUMÍN – ZAPOMNIANA ORÊDOWNICZKA UCIOENIONYCH KOBIET

Author(s): Gabriela Gańczarczyk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2017

The most frequent and important topic raised by Jiøí Sumín in his prose was a description of social situation of women at the turn of the century. His characters were described as fully dependant, subordinated; they were seen as “goods” in the common marriage market and therefore educated only in this narrow field. Despite their difficult situation, some of these women never stopped dreaming about freedom and a better life and, in the outcome, each of them had to pay substantial price for it. Based on her own experience, writer Amálie Vrbováaka Jiøí Sumín created an interesting gallery of women at different age, coming from various social backgrounds, who had one common individual characteristic: disappointment.

ALOIS BEER – NAIWNY OUTSIDER

Author(s): Piotr Gierowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2017

The main aim of the paper is to present the person of Alois Beer (1833-1897), a Czechnaive painter and writer. He was a craftsman who worked and lived in Dobruška in the northernBohemia in the second half of the 19th century. His literary and painting output contains 65notebooks with his memories and drawings describing his travels across Europe and everyday life in Dobruška. His work was discovered and recalled by Karel Michl in the 1930’s, but the important factor in its success and popularity was also the avant-garde interest in the outsider and naive art, which started in the 1920’s (in 1920 Josef Èapek published his famous essays Nejskromnìjší umìní devoted to the issue of the non-professional art). In the second half of the20th century, Alois Beer was also an inspiration for the literary character of Jára Cimrman. It isa significant fact which shows the important role of the historical and artistic exclusion in theCzech culture and Czech identity.

„POCTIVÍ AUTOŘI“ A „ODPADLÍCI“ ANEB STRATEGIE VYLUČOVÁNÍ V NORMALIZAČNÍ KULTURNÍ PUBLICISTICE. NEPOHODLNÍ AUTOŘI ZOBRAZENÍ NA STRÁNKÁCH TVORBY V LETECH 1969–1970

Author(s): Tereza Šnellerová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2017

The Czech literature of the 1970’s has its own cursed poets. They were artists who refused to accept the changed authoritative conditions after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakiain August 1968 and could not (because of their democratic actions in the past) or did not want to be involved in a new political and cultural system. The new tough regime had to come to terms with their disloyalty and one of its most useful tools was the press. The present study focuses on various ways of eliminating unwanted authors from public life by means of the cultural and political journal Tvorba. It analyses literary reviews and cultural articles published in Tvorba and describes the scale of methods by which the names of “renegades” are (mis-)used at the beginning of the normalization era.