From the origins to the Renewal
If some texts in Old Slavic from the Romanesque period have reached us, it is in Latin that Cosmas, an ecclesiastic who died in 1125, writes his Chronica boemerum. This invaluable work combines historical descriptions and founding myths, including that of Princess Libuše, daughter of Krok, who by the grace of her gift of prophecy chose a farmer as her husband, initiated the Přemyslides dynasty and decided on the location of Prague. These texts can be found, among others, in the Devil's Bible, or Codex Gigas. It is said that the author of this 13th century manuscript would be Herman the Reclus, a Benedictine who had broken his monastic vows and who, in order not to be buried alive, had undertaken to write in one night a book gathering all human knowledge. Around midnight, realizing that he would not succeed, he would have sought Lucifer's help..
The first text in Czech, the Dalimil Chronicle marks the beginning of the 14th century. We know nothing about the author who traces the history of his country, affecting him with a message urging him to rebel against the German enemy. The times remain troubled, it is in a complicated political and religious context that the preacher Jan Hus was born. His death at the stake in 1415 led to the insurrection of the Hussites. His life will also be marked by his work as a linguist and his De orthographia bohemica will influence the spelling of Czech, which is adorned with diacritics. Another revolution gradually spread in Bohemia at the end of the 15th century and in the 16th century: the Gutenberg printing house. In the following century, it facilitated the dissemination of Comenius' ideas (1592-1670). Considered as the father of modern pedagogy, he advocates education for all, without distinction of religion, social class or gender. The country was subjected to wars and the man, whose real name was Jan Amos Komenský, experienced endless exile.
During a long period of domination, the Czech language tended to disappear, although some, such as Bohuslav Balbín (1621-1688) and his book Dissertatio apologetica pro lingua slavonica, praecipue bohemica, fought to preserve it. In the first half of the 18th century, the Germanization of society was the order of the day, and Joseph II decided to make German the official administrative language. In the second half of the century, the shivers of national renewal were felt, thanks in particular to the historical writings of Gelasius Dobner (Monumenta historica bohemia). Mandated by the Bohemian Academy of Sciences, Josef Dobrovský (1753-1829) began a European tour in search of manuscripts scattered during the Thirty Years' War, while Josef Jakub Jungmann (1773-1847) purged the Czech language of its germanisms and replaced them with neologisms or pickaxes in neighbouring idioms. Václav Hanka (1791-1861) continued the spelling reform and was invited by Russia to set up a Slavic library in St Petersburg with the help of Pavel Jozef Šafárik and František Ladislav Čelakovský These intellectuals are called the "pan-Slavic awakeners" or "Palacký generation", named after the one whose journey shows how the affirmation of language is becoming a political issue.
The national renewal has a strong influence on literature. Karel Jaromír Erben joined the Prague Journal in 1848 as editor, where he would hardly remain, but it was mainly for his role as archivist and for his collection of popular fairy tales that he remained famous. Božena Němcová, who died in Prague in 1862, is also very famous, so much so that her portrait adorns some banknotes. Her novel Babička, Grand-mère in French, was completed in 1854 and remains a classic. She draws inspiration from her family history to stage an old lady whose deeply optimistic and humanistic view of life has won the hearts of many readers. Karel Hynek Mácha's verses still resonate today. The short life of this romantic poet and his masterpiece, Mai, published in the year of his death in 1836, when he was only 25 years old, made him the founder of modern Czech poetry. It will have a major influence on the next generation that will create the "May School". Their first publication appeared in 1858, with some personalities, such as Jan Neruda (1834-1891), who used a satirical verve in his collection of new Tales of Mala Strana, or Jakub Arbes, considered one of the precursors of science fiction.
While nationalist issues are stirring the feathers, the major European literary trends are emerging between the lines. The Mrštík brothers saw their naturalistic tragedy Maryša performed for the first time on the stage of the National Theatre in Prague in 1894. The drama of this young woman married by force by her father to a man she does not love has made her an ever popular female character in our time. For his part, Otokar Březina (1868-1929) explored symbolism, which unfortunately did not allow him to win the Nobel Prize for literature despite having been on the list of candidates eight times. The poet Jaroslav Vrchlický (1853-1912) also worked at the opening by translating several thousand poems into Czech, in all languages.
The twentieth century, from the avant-garde to exile
The very end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century marked a decisive turning point for literature, which flourished through the works of several authors whose reputations had since spread far beyond national borders. The best known is of course Franz Kafka who, through history, was born an Austrian in Prague on 3 July 1883 and died a Czechoslovakian near Vienna forty years later. His mother tongue is German, and he will use it to write the few texts that have reached us thanks to his friend Max Brod who did not respect his last wishes asking him to destroy them after his death, notably Le Procès (1925) and Le Château (1926), unfortunately unfinished. La Métamorphose, which tells of the transformation of a commercial traveller into an insect, appeared in a magazine in 1915 in Leipzig during his lifetime and this news, certainly his best known, never ceased to generate multiple analyses. Also born in 1883, Jaroslav Hašek also produced a masterpiece. Drawing inspiration from his somewhat hectic life and his own experience of the Great War, he gave body, but not much spirit, to his Brave Soldier Švejk whose grotesque adventures, although not over because of his untimely death, continue to entertain readers. Put into drawings by the illustrator Josef Lada, the character is depicted in a sturdy and badly shaved shape. Another style from Karel's side Čapek (1890-1938) who was the first to use in his play R.U.R. in 1920, the word "robot" invented by his elder brother Josef from the Czech term robota (work). We also owe him The Salamander War, a political dystopia in which an unknown marine species takes over. This text, which was a major criticism of the upheavals of the time, was hardly distributed when it was published in 1936, but it is still being republished. It is now available at Cambourakis and La Baconnière
Like many intellectuals of his time, Karel Čapek is also a Francophile, and his translation of the anthology La Poésie française de l'époque moderne, in which Zone d'Apollinaire appears, will strongly inspire young students who, in 1920, decide to meet. The brothers Čapek give them a name: Devětsil. The vanguard is on the move. Among the founding members are the writer Vladislav Vančura, the future Nobel Prize winner for literature Jaroslav Seifert, the painter Adolf Hoffmeister and Karel Teige, art theorist, who will join forces three years later with the poetry, the surrealist movement he leads with the poet Vítězslav Nezval and for which he will write a manifesto. For this generation of the inter-war period, there were many avenues for exploration, the stage knew the innovations of the Théâtre libéré, and political commitment was never far away, as evidenced by the Levá fronta organization and its eponymous magazine, founded in 1929, again by Kareil Teige.
From the end of the 1930s onwards, tension increased and on 15 March 1939, the Wehrmacht entered Prague. Three years later, a collective of artists, Skupina 42, was born, made up of sculptors, painters, photographers and of course authors, including Josef Kainar, Jiří Kolář known for his collages, and the poet Ivan Blatný. The activities of the Group 42 will be abundant but prohibited in 1948. The city was then under the yoke of communism following the Prague Coup in February. Publications that had tended to increase since the end of the Second World War must now follow the injunction of socialist realism, little space is left for imagination in favour of political ideology. From this period, some writers chose exile, such as Viktor Fischl (Avigdor Dagan) who evokes the Shoah in his novel Les Bouffons du roi, or Ferdinand Peroutka whose Le Nuage et la valse, which was a play before becoming a novel, was reprinted by La Contre Allée in 2019. In protest, Milada Součková also decides to stay in the United States where she was a cultural attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy. She will continue to write her poetry in Czech, although it will be decades before she is published in her country.
In the late 1950s, and especially in the 1960s, a relative relaxation allowed writers to return to the public arena and the number of journals to rise. Josef Škvorecký's first novel, Les Lâches (1958), was nevertheless banned and this sentence cost him his job. New feathers appear: Ladislav Fuks, whose L'Incinérateur de cadavres (1967) was an international success, Arnošt Lustig, who participated in the New Wave with the scripts he drew from his novels, Bohumil Hrabal, whose first collection of short stories appeared in 1963, and of course Milan Kundera, whose Žert was published in Prague in 1967 and in France in 1968 (Gallimard) under the title La joisanterie. This regained freedom of expression reached its peak during the Prague Spring, but the new socialism with a human face came to a sudden end in August 1968 with the invasion of the country by the Warsaw Pact troops. The "normalization" that followed particularly affected writers, some chose to publish samizdats clandestinely, others opted for exile such as Milan Kundera who found refuge in France in the 1970s. In Prague, authors who comply with the requirements of official literature must adapt their words or address "neutral" themes. It was not until 1989 and the Velvet Revolution, led by a writer who became president, Václav Havel, that the floodgates opened again, as evidenced by the hundreds of independent publishing houses that were created. The word is liberated, autobiographies flourish and postmodernism colours the new writings. Today, some contemporary voices are translated into French. Noir sur Blanc published Zone cirque by Jáchym Topol in 2009, L'Éducation des jeunes filles en Bohême by Michal Viewegh appeared by Flammarion in 1998 and Le Fouet vivant by Miloš Urban by Fayard in 2013.
