ABSTRACT
Inspired by methodological considerations stemming from musicology, history, and cultural studies, this essay functions to a certain extent as a summary of the various approaches taken in the book, while also providing food for thought for possible future studies. Since we often tend to treat our biographical subjects as fiction, it is not clear that we make fine distinctions between “real” figures such as Josefina Čermáková, Marie Červinková-Riegrová, Antonín Dvořák, Anna Dvořáková, and Jeanette Thurber, and imaginary ones such as Minnehaha, Ježibaba, and Rusalka. By way of an afterword, this essay treats all of these women, and others, as simultaneously fictional and non-fictional. It presents biographical spotlights for all of them, and argues that the figure we call “Dvořák” is unthinkable without these women, and vice versa. And while one could take from this the (mistaken) view that the women are orbiting around Dvořák-as-sun, at the same time the reverse is true: they are the core and centre, and it is he who is in motion. More importantly, this essay shows that this constellation of actual and fictional humans comprises a kind of “network” without which “Dvořák” is impossible.
