ABSTRACT
This Western Slavonic language is the official language of the Czech Republic, spoken by around 12 million people. Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible. Writing in Czech dates from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Historically, Czech culture and literature are orientated towards Western Europe, rather than towards Moscow and the Orthodox Church. Czech had become established as a literary language by the late thirteenth century with works such as the Alexandreida romance – an adaptation by an unknown author of the French writer de Chatillon’s twelfth-century Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great, and composed with great linguistic sophistication and ingenuity – and Kunhutina modlitba (‘Kunhuta’s prayer’), a eucharistic poem of similarly high technical and stylistic skill. The reign of Charles IV (fourteenth century) saw not only the first complete translation of the Bible (1370s), but also the true flowering of Czech writing, with a body of literature encompassing all genres, secular and religious, from verse and prose romances to drama and philosophical works. Prominent works from this period include the Dalimilova kronika (‘Chronicle of Dalimil’), a low-style but effective patriotic work in irregular couplets, and the high-style verse legend Život svaté Kateřiny (‘Life of St Catherine’). This important and substantial European literary heritage is still little known in the West. The religious reformer Jan Hus played a notable role in the formation of a standardized literary language, eliminating obsolete forms such as the aorist from the language and introducing a new orthography which remains in all its essentials to this day. The suppression of Czech culture, associated with the Counter-Reformation, lasted until the late eighteenth century, when contact with Western sources was re-established, and a Romantic renaissance ensued, exemplified by Karel Hynek Mácha’s epic Máj (‘May’). This period culminated in the abortive revolution of 1848. From the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War, Czech was the vehicle for a very rich and extensive literature in all genres, especially poetry (e.g. Neruda, Vrchlický, Bezruč, Březina) and the novel (Holeček, Hašek, Čapek). Prominent writers since the war include Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal, both of whom, along with many others, fell foul of the communist authorities and had works banned.
