Local interest
Czech literature dates from the 10th century. The legends of St. Wenceslaus, composed in that century, were written in Old Church Slavonic.
Until c.1400, Czech literature consisted mainly of Latin chronicles
(Cosmas of Prague, 1125) and Czech hymns, tales of chivalry, and
romances in verse. The 15th century witnessed a poetic flowering that
paralleled increasing national consciousness. In 1394, Smil Flaka of
Pardubice initiated modern realistic Czech literature with an
allegorical admonition in verse, New Council. In a similar vein were
the sermons of Tomáš Štítný (c.1331-c.1401) and the works of the
peasant mystic Petr Chelčický (The Net of the True Faith, 1440-43).
The language reforms of John Huss helped to make Czech an effective
literary language for the writers of the Renaissance, as in the works
of the humanists, in the religious and secular writings of the Moravian
bishop Jan Blahoslav (1503-71), and in the histories of Veleslavin
(1545-99). The crowning glory of the age was the Kralice Bible,
translated by the Czech Brethren and published from 1579 to 1593. The
Thirty Years War (1618-48) brought wholesale destruction of Czech
literary works followed by repression of national life.
In the 17th century the great educator
Comenius
(Jan Amos Komenský), like many other Czechs, worked in exile, and the
language was gradually reduced to little more than a peasant dialect.
In the late 18th century, men like the philologists
Josef Dobrovský and Josef Jungmann helped to rehabilitate writing in Czech.
Jan Kollár led the Pan-Slavic revival in the early 19th century, while
Karel Hynek Mácha
, considered the foremost Czech poet, expressed a Byronic romanticism
developed further by the novelist Božena Němcová and the poet Karel J.
Erben.
The Nineteenth Century
Pan-Slavism and romanticism dominated Czech literature in the first half of the 19th century. František Palacký
highlighted Slavic scholarship. The 9th- and 13th-century Slavic texts
produced by Václav Hanka (1791-1861) were proved spurious; they became,
however, part of the Czech literary tradition and remained influential.
In the later 19th century, when the poetry of Svatopluk Čech, Jan Neruda, and Joseph V. Sládek and the novels of Alois Jirásek achieved fame, literature was oriented toward the intellectual and the bourgeois.
Modern Czech Literature
After 1890 realism gained force with the writings of the influential
critic Thomas Masaryk. Proletarian and rural themes were developed, and
writers such as Jaroslav Vrchlický, J. S. Machar, Petr Bezruč, and Otokar Březina won fame at home, while Karel Čapek
brought Czech literature into the mainstream of world letters. In the
period from 1918 to 1938 Czech literature was the most cosmopolitan of
the Slavonic literatures; at the same time native themes were
cultivated. A dominant trend was the movement away from the
intellectual and the individual toward the abstract and the hedonistic.
Jaroslav Hašek
produced his classic war satire, The Good Soldier Schweik (4 vol.,
1920-23), and Franz Kafka dominated the literary circles of Prague.
The German occupation saw the destruction of Czech literary art and
the death of many outstanding figures. After World War II a
reorientation of Czech writing toward Russia ensued, and socialist realism
became dominant in Czech literature. Postwar novelists of note include
Egon Hostovský and Jan Drda. Some relaxation of the strictures of
socialist realism was evident in the 1950s and 60s. The postwar
emigration produced a great flowering in Czech letters, including two
writers with world reputations, Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký.
