ABSTRACT
One of the significant manifestations of ignorance respecting literary life is faith in the existence of “Bohemia.” There is not a great capital in the world to-day without its purely imaginary and invented “Bohemia”—by the way, the very use of this word is evidence of an old-fashioned simplicity—and in this “Bohemia” are supposed to dwell the “Bohemians.” There never was such a place even in the conventions of literature. It is now and always has been as mythical as More's “Utopia” or as the gardens of the Hesperides. The “near” genius who first wrote of it did not believe in it, and yet it remains the supreme literary illusion of the uninformed. The cause of so unique and so persistent a delusion, which no amount of exposure can quite dispel, is set forth by the clever Austrian critic, Raoul Auernheimer, in the Vienna Neue Freie Presse.
