Karel Horký – voják druhé armády

Author(s): Štěpán Filípek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 50/2018

His extraordinary journalistic skills predisposed Karel Horký to become a significant figure of resistance journalism and propaganda during the Great War. It was here that his journalistic style relishing in pamphletic belligerence, exquisite wording and effective slogans and catchwords proved useful. However, his individualism, explosive character and unwillingness to bow down to authorities were sooner or later bound to surface. This brought him into existentially strained, risky and even dangerous situations. The trigger was the fate of his father-in-law Josef Dürich and the fall of the ex-vice chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council (Československá národní rada). Horký stood to his defense (their family ties not being the only reason), but this got him into an insolvable situation: a short period of cooperation with Edvard Beneš was followed by a great rift between both men and Horký was as a result professionally as well as socially isolated, without, however, resigning on his efforts to work as a journalist in support of the establishment of an independent state. When the independence was gained, Horký did welcome it, but he was never persuaded to identify his citizen loyalty to the Republic with the loyalty to the Republic’s leading representatives. The events that had taken place during the war thus had a profound effect on Horký’s subsequent position within the public sphere. He gained a long-lasting reputation of always having to be in an opposition, even of a grumbler. In the interwar period he joined the right wing political camp. Despite that, it would be a pity to brush his journalistic work aside by reference to his ties with Dürich or by a one-sided interpretation of facts. Not only is his work original and unmistakable, but it also often offers an interesting perspective on historical events, coming from a direct witness and participant.

Vladimír Vaněk a jeho vzpomínky Moje válečná odysea

Author(s): Miloslava Slavíčková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 50/2018

In his book Moje valečná odysea (My War-Time Odyssey, 1925), Vladimír Vaněk (1895–1965) recorded his memories from pre-war Ukraine and from the battles of the First World War. He witnessed the foundation of volunteer troops in Kiev, fought on the Galician front, served as a spy and a contact for the home resistance in Prague and, finally, cooperated with the political resistance in the West. Some of his memories found their way into his other literary works, most notably the novel Jorden blöder – jorden blommar (1943, The Land Is Bleeding – The Land Is Blooming). The experience from the First World War proved useful in later years, too. As a participant in the armed as well as the political resistance, Vaněk considered the First World War to be an indispensable prerequisite to the foundation of the independent Czechoslovak Republic, but he also described the cruelty of the war and questioned its moral justification.

Tvorba Hanse Watzlika v letech 1917–1919

Author(s): Václav Maidl / Language(s): Czech Issue: 50/2018

Hans Watzlik was the laureate of the Czechoslovak State Award for Literature (1931), but in 1946 he was convicted of propagating and supporting the Nazi movement by the Special Peoples’ Tribunal in Klatovy. This paper focuses on Watzlik’s novel O Böhmen! (Oh, Bohemia!, 1917), in which he had for the first time revealed his sympathies for the German nationalistic movement. The circulation of the novel reached in the following quarter of a century 50‚000 copies. In this novel, evincing traits of a grenzlandroman, Watzlik does on the one hand show his admiration for the rise of the Czech nation during the nineteenth century, yet, on the other, he warns against the danger of Czechs penetrating into the border areas of Czech Kingdom, which were populated by Germans. He goes on to think through the consequences of an escalated ethnic conflict. The novel relies on a number of stereotypical depictions (eg.: Germans as the bearers of culture in Central Europe, the Hussite movement as primarily anti-German, the melancholy softness of Slavonic songs), it contains a number of ideas typical for various groups from the pre-war period (Schöner’s German nationalistic movement in Austria, the anti-Catholic movement Los von Rom! [Away from Rome!]) or for the general cultural atmosphere of that era (Wagnerism, the cult of the Nibelungs). After the First World War and the establishment of Czechoslovakia, Watzlik’s attitude to the German question does not change. In his small book of poems Zu neuen Sternen (To the New Stars, 1919), the author responds to the violent suppression of a German demonstration in the border areas from March 4, 1919 and calls upon his readers to overcome the hard times and to have faith in a better future awaiting the humiliated nation.

K.-OVA POTRAGA

Author(s): Wystan Hugh Auden / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 515/2019

Duže Kafkine pripovesti pripadaju jednoj od najstarijih književnih vrsta - potrazi, i možda neće biti naodmet pristupiti njegovom delu poredeći ga sa nekim od ranijih primera ove vrste. Primera radi, šta je, u različitim vremenima, bio predmet potrage i ko je bio njen junak?

O PROCESU

Author(s): Huw Wheldon,Orson Welles / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 515/2019

Interview with Orson Welles by Huw Wheldon

KAFKAS MACHTPHANTASIEN

Author(s): Slobodan Grubačić / Language(s): German Issue: 18/1/2017

Power has become a far-reaching, structuring theme of thought in the literature of the 20th century. For Kafka the concept of power is “sociologically ambiguous”: among the transitions of the mythenes in the third octave-book, interspersed with aphorisms and epistemological theories, there is an entry from October 20, 1917, which has a fairytale begin “There was once“ and it ends similary: ‘’There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people. They always stood by each other. If, for instance, one of them had made a stranger, someone outside their community, unhappy in some rather scoundrelly way—that is to say, again, nothing scoundrelly, but just what is usual, just the normal sort of thing—and he then confessed to the whole community, they investigated the case, judged [72] it, imposed penances, pardoned, and the like.

O literatuře na cigaretových papírcích a průklepovém papíře. Historie československého samizdatu na příkladu života a díla Karla Pecky

Author(s): Petra Loučová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 34/2019

The life story of writer Karel Pecka (1928–1997) offers a unique glimpse into the history of unofficial literary and book culture in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989 as well as into the life of a writer in a totalitarian regime. Pecka’s samizdat “Odyssey” started by printing the illegal leaflet magazine Za pravdu in 1949. Back then, he could hardly anticipate how much publishing in unofficial, “parallel” book circulation will define his work in the decades to follow. As a prisoner in the Jáchymov and Příbram labour camps in the 1950s, he continued secretly writing collections of poems, followed by short stories. He was a member of prison samizdat, the most beautiful items of which were reportedly written on cigarette paper. From the early 1960s on, some of his handwritten works were first distributed among selected readers in mimeographed copies due to delays in publication. His brief official writer career was cut short by the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies to Czechoslovakia in August 1968. This opened the second twenty-year period of Pecka’s life marked by the impossibility to publish and attempts at overcoming the barrier. His novel, Štěpení, delivered to Škvorecký in Toronto in handwritten form and subsequently issued by their ’68 Publishers publishing house, made Pecka a bona fide samizdat pioneer. The normalisation of 1970s and 1980s spent in the alternative culture environment brought several more publications in exile and samizdat editions (including Motáky nezvěstnému) and a series of texts in the Obsah periodical. Pecka’s samizdat life ended with the post-samizdat publication of his prison poems, Rekonstrukce, self-released in 1995, two years before his death.

Petra Hůlová’s representation of Mongolian women in “All This Belongs to Me”

Author(s): Ko Jeong yun / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

This article examines the Czech writer Petra Hůlová’ s representation of Mongolian women inAll This Belongs to Me in an effort to discuss possible epistemological dangers involved in suchcross-cultural representation of Asia by a European writing self. Through a close reading ofthe text, the paper explores how the represented five Mongolian females from one family areinvariably subsumed under the strong patriarchal ideology of their Mongolian society. Thisrepresentation of Mongolian women’s oppression is then discussed in the historical context ofOrientalism, which has excessively exaggerated patriarchal culture of Asia and Asian women’soppression. Examining strategies Hůlová adopts to resist mere exoticization of Mongolianculture, the paper considers whether Hůlová’ s cross-cultural representation presents chancesfor opportunities for readers outside of Mongolia to expand the horizon of their Eurocentricworld view.

„Já jsem to jen podle jeho řeči složil a maličko jsem k tomu sám přidal…“ Ke stylizaci lidového vypravěče v próze na přelomu padesátých a šedesátých let 19. století

Author(s): Alice Jedličková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2019

The paper prompted by the discussion on the apprehension of ordinary folk and folkcharacter in the 19th century stems from long-term research into narrative techniquesof fiction written in the period of time in question. Its central categories include therelation between the architext of folk experience narration and other folk genresto their literary applications, as well as stylization of a skaz-like folk narrator. Suchnarrator typically identifies her- or himself as homodiegetic, however, she enjoys ahigher degree of authority (especially omniscience) than plausible in her position.This may be explained by the author´s need to keep the plot attractive for any kind ofaudience. On the other hand, alternating the mode of the folk narrator and sophisticatedliterary techniques points to the effort to address the well-read audience. Basedon the comparison of typical examples from the production of three authors (KarolinaSvětlá, Leopold Hansmann and Vítězslav Hálek), the communication intentions ofsuch narrators and their attitude to the assumed audience can be conceptualized,respectively, as integration, togetherness and confrontation.

Česko-slovenské společenství na půdě současné fanouškovské literatury. Případ fandomu Harry Potter

Author(s): Terezie Šmídová,Marcin Filipowicz / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2019

The goal of the paper is to map the Czecho-Slovak community in the field of contemporaryfan fiction inspired by the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling asa follow-up to the tradition of research into the Czecho-Slovak literary and culuralrelations. It is built on the conception of a „peculiar literary community“ of the Czechsand the Slovaks formulated by Dionýz Ďurišin. What is then analyzed is the space ofCzecho-Slovak websites administered by so-called fans for fans. The activities of theCzecho-Slovak community in the field of fan fiction cannot be summarized easilydue to several reasons including the fact that the relations within the community arecontinuously developing and changing. The existence of the Czecho-Slovak literarycommunity mainly influenced by nostalgia and personal mindsets of individual debatersis seemingly dominated by disruptive moments strongly motivated by rivarlybetween the two nations. That is mostly reflected in the debates about the Czechor Slovak translations of the original text. However, it is necessary to note that thecommunity (so-called fandom) sees itself as Czecho-Slovak and the most-visitedwebsites are declared to be Czecho-Slovak, too. Regardless of the most noticeablemanifestations of non-togetherness, the fact that the common Czecho-Slovak spaceexists, what´s more spontaneously, without any ideological prompting, and providesplace for linguistic debates, actually gives witness to strong cultural togetherness. Thepaper does not only attempt to follow in the research tradition but also to shift the focusthat has so far been given to high literature to popular literature and culture, whichis the area where the Czecho-Slovak community currently seems to be most active.

Ukolébavka – žánr v pohybu

Author(s): Svatava Urbanová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2018

This study concerns lullaby – one of the oldest genres of oral folk tradition aimed at young children. The author focuses on its folklore form and its literary modification in the Czech national, literary and cultural traditions. Ukolébavky (Lullabies) (2017) – a recently published book of texts by Robin Král with illustrations by Jaroslav Róna, was the inspiration for this study. The book’s texts were also adapted by a musician Jan Lstibůrek and the songs were performed by some of the popmusic singers and recorded on CD. Comparison of the printed and digitalised versions with their folklore forms enabled the author to derive typological features: contact with a child, emotionality, syncretism, figurativeness and narrative-thematic plane. The comparison has revealed differences but also some shared characteristics as space-time and archetypes. Interesting archetypes include the archetypes of both transformations and eternal return and elemental archetypes as the archetypes of water and air. Lullaby as a literary genre undergoes transformation determined by age factor, mode of communication and social and cultural differences.

Češka Republika 2018.

Author(s): Hasan Zahirović / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1-2/2019

Svake godine redakcija iLiteratura.cz objavljuje na svojoj stranici najbolje knjige u protekloj godini. Internetski književni časopis iLiteratura.cz se postepeno formirao od 2000. do 2002. godine. Radi se o nezavisnom i neprofitnom projektu. Glavni cilj je da ukoliko je moguće umjesto klasičnog časopisa tu ulogu preuzme stranica – koja ima zadatak da prati i komentira aktuelan stav književnih ponuda u Češkoj i inostranstvu, te služi u arhivske svrhe – bogati arhiv dosad sadrži preko 8 000 tekstova.

Odeon Publishing: The Island of Freedom

Author(s): Vratislav Kozák / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

Normalization period is a unique time in Czechoslovak history that is almost everywhere presented as a time when the socialist regime used its position of power to take back all production and culture including publishing houses. Odeon was a well-known entity at that time and looking back at the editorial and publishing plan from the said period it sometimes seems as if Odeon was partially untouched by the repressions. It is important to concentrate on everyday life in the publishing house while trying to find out how Odeon and its editorial team managed to publish so many books that almost nobody expected to see in a Czechoslovak bookshop. The topic of state censorship, as well as a very specific topic of “covering” the banned authors, will be the central focal point of this article.

Mágikus pokoljárások, avagy háttérzajok a kiszolgáltatottság antropológiájához

Author(s): András A. Gergely / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2019

Most of the books by Jáchym Topol (Prague, 1962) have earned themselves a prominent place among the strikingly complex, but, as for their overall impression, devastating narrative modes. The cycling stream of degenerating mysteries, non-stop expectation of unrealism, clues to unpredictability and the determination to searching are typical for perhaps all of his novels.

Medzi literatúrou, umeleckým prednesom a inscenačným tvarom (niekoľko poznámok k problematike detského prednesu a detského divadla)

Author(s): Mária Kuderjavá / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2016

The literary works of Julian Tuwim and Karel Čapek possess expressive and aesthetic potential that suits the purpose of artistic recitation and children’s theatre. The paper introduces some methods of creative drama utilising which one can effectively develop a positive relationship to literature in junior school age children and develop their literary but also drama competences. These methods offer effective communication strategies for working with literary texts. Through them, it is possible to develop conceptually-cognitive and emotionally-imaginative dimensions of pupil’s personality.

Erbenove kytice v slovenskej literatúre pre deti a mládež

Author(s): Martina Matyášová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2015

The collection of ballads Kytice written by Karel Jaromír Erben belongs to the masterpieces of Czech romanticism. This collection is significant for its interconnection with history, folk poetics and Czech national tradition. It was translated into Slovak in 1970s by Ľubomír Feldek. The result of this translation was an enrichment of Slovak juvenile literature with this important and valuable piece of art. The paper is focused on the comparison of the Czech original with the Slovak translation. Specific features are noticed and highlighted, and the value of Feldek’s translation in Slovak juvenile literature is analysed.

Родовото недоразбирање во „Погрешно разбрани зборови“ (третиот дел од Неподносливата леснотија на постоењето од Милан Кундера)

Author(s): Goce Smilevski / Language(s): Macedonian Issue: 1/2003

Češka Republika 2019.

Author(s): Hasan Zahirović / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1-4/2020

Već nekoliko godina unazad redakcija časopisa iliteratura.cz odabere i napravi spisak zanimljivih i uspješnih knjiga objavljenih u protekloj godini. Iliteratura konstantno prati tržište knjiga i kako pišu na svojim stranicama: “[ž]ele da budu sigurni da barem neki od dobrih naslova ne padnu u zaborav“. Pri izboru knjiga se misli na male i na velike čitatelje, diskutuje se o čitalačkoj ponudi naslova različitih žanrova. U ovom tekstu predstavljamo samo neke nama zanimljivije kategorije.

На путу за Константинопољ: чешки путописци на Балкану

Author(s): Aleksandra Korda-Petrović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 169/2019

The 17th-century Czech travelogues, written in Latin and Czech, by Václav Budovec of Budova (Anti-alkorаn, 1614), Václav Vratislav of Mitrovic (The Experiences of Václav Vratislav of Mitrovic, which he had in the Turkish capital Constantinople, encountered in his imprisonment in 1591 and recorded upon his happy return in 1599) and Heřman Černín z Chudenic (Diary of 1645) are testimonies of the beginnings of creating a stereotypical image of the Balkans, which the following Czech travel writers would adopt. As members of the Hungarian diplomatic missions, they recorded their adventures, impressions and thoughts in the form of religious polemics, adventure writings and diary entries. The lands, peoples and customs which these Czech travel writers encounter on their way to Constantinople are viewed as the province of the mighty Ottoman Empire, and the people living there are described as subjugated and “en-route”. The travel writers often do not make any ethnic differences and do not offer a broader picture of the regions they pass, but only describe what they see in the vicinity of the Trajan’s road. Their goal is Constantinople and they are focused on it. Their image of the Balkans, which they still do not name so, is blended into the image of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish empire is presented as powerful, belligerent and dangerous. On his way to Constantinople the traveler encounters many dangers, he needs protection and escort, he could get ill or end up in prison. This is what gradually shapes a stereotype of the whole Balkan region which is experienced as the area characteristic for the Ottoman heritage. The 19th-century Czech travel writers, Vítězslav Hálek and Jan Neruda recorded their observations from their trip to Tsargrad much later than the first Czech travelers to Constantinople. The different historical circumstances changed the angle of their views of the Balkans and the form of their records itself had come a long way in the travel-writing genre development. Their travel feuilletons, however, follow the existing “mental maps” of the earlier travel writers and convey the picture of the Balkans as an exotic destination which they regard as a region where the European and Oriental cultures are intertwined and where the tradition of the Ottoman heritage is predominant.

Karafiátovi Broučci v slovenskom preklade

Author(s): Ján Gallik / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2014

The aim of research paper titled Karafiát´s Beetles in Slovak Translation is to highlight the importance and benefits of the author tales written by Czech Lutheran priest Jan Karafiát. The tale was published anonymously the first time, was not illustrated and was published own expense in 1876 with the official name Broučci pro malé i velké děti. Since then, the tale was published in a number of reissues (only in Czech language about a hundred editions), even on sound carriers and the tale became an incentive for the creation of several cartoon tales and radio plays. Also, a fairy tale has been translated into several foreign languages (into English, German, Russian and Polish). Even in the Slovak language Chrobáčikovia or Chrobáčiky pre malé i veľké deti, the fairy tale was published several times. In the science article is the subject of analysis the latest edition of Chrobáčiky in Slovak language from 2010, which was published in Praha in Otto´spublisher. The latest edition illustrated Ľuba Suchalová.