| Description |
The contexts of Czech literature are related to the crisis and revolutionary situation which gradually rose towards the end of the 19th century and reached its peak just in the years of the First World War and during the attempts at the world revolution. This was manifetsed by a certain dichotomy of Czech literature after 1918 when Czechoslovakia came into existence as a relatively big state and a strong parliamentary democracy among more or less authoritarian countries, the state with a first-quality army tested by the battles of the First World War, with strong industry and agriculture which represented the kernel of Austro-Hungary in the past. On the one hand there was a majority and influential left, on the other conservative currents often connected wuih Catholic Church and in the middle liberal streams linked with the official policy of the so-called Prague Castle represented by the personality of the first president T. G. Masaryk (e. g. Karel Čapek). Nevertheless, the Czech literature as a whole helped create the national and state consciousnes; they differ from each other only by the preference of traditions and political and economic systems. The problems of the new state were, of course, not only social, but also national, ethnic and religious which were reflected in the international framework, too.Unlike the other Central European countries (hereby we reject the term „East-Central Europe”, in German „Ostmitteleuropa” as a asymmetric, as „Westmitteleuropa” has been used only rarely; Central Europe is a compact term, synthetic, and the so-called ethnic mixture of its eastern part is not a strong argument) Czech literature presented radical left tendencies which were realised in the Czech modernist avantgarde, the top of which was manifested by Czech poetism and surrealism (similarly also in Slovakia) and their authors, among others Vítězslav Nezval, František Halas, Josef Hora, Jaroslav Seifert (Nobel Prize winner 1984), Konstantin Biebl etc., but very impressive from the artistic point of view was also the Catholic currents (Jakub Deml, Jaroslav Durych, Jan Zahradníček, Jan Čep and others); both of the tendencies were surprisingly and paradoxically related to each other, as well as their bearers; besides poetry the prominent position was occupied by the drama and the novel (the Brothers Čapek, Vladislav Vančura etc); the list of influential writers might be broadened. The mutual relation of „the bulding of the state“ (the title of a very important book by the famous Czech journalist and politician Ferdinand Peroutka) and Czech literature is supported by the fact that just in the period 1918-1938 the Czech literature reached, in modern history for the first time, a world level. We defend the thesis that Czech literature connected with the rise of the independent Czechoslovak state regardless of all these problems and idealistic constructions („Czechoslovakism“), created a specific, original model of the co-existence of various currents of thought and the relations between culture in its widest sense and practical politics. This enabled the Czech literature to form radical artistic innovations anticipating the evolutionary tendencies of world literature (surrealism, antiutopia/dystopia, baroquizing prose, experimental novel).
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