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CZECH NOVEL
Czech literature in general and the Czech novel in particular developed relatively late. In 1620, the Protestant Czechs were defeated by the Catholic Hapsburgs at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague. Bohemia, as the area was then called, was seriously ravaged by war, forcibly catholicized, and subjected to economic exploitation. The Czech language lost its official status and, with few exceptions, ceased being used as a medium of intellectual and creative discourse for almost two centuries.
At the beginning of the 19th century, a Czech nationalist movement came into being, known as the Czech National Revival. By mid-century, Czech writers had created a new literary tradition, in which poetry and later the short story were the leading genres. The first serious modern Czech fiction was written by Bozena Nemcová, who also wrote descriptive nonfiction pieces known as “images of national life” -folkloric descriptions of rural Czech society, which, according to the nationalists, held the essence of the national character. Nemcová's fiction serves as a vehicle for her social criticism. The novels are sharply realistic in their representations of contemporary conditions, while their endings, somewhat contrived, are predicated on her social utopianism. Nemcová's most important work is Babicka (1855; The Grandmother), which stands halfway between the “images of national life” and the novels. Drawing on the author's childhood memories, Babicka paints the portrait of an archetypal rural grandmother, the absolute center of her family, who is represented as a repository of Czech virtue. The seasons function as the work's basic structural device.
Influenced by George Sand, Nemcová may be called a protofeminist. Karolina Svetlá similarly displayed an interest in strong women characters. Her novels of the 1860s and 1870s, set in rural northern Bohemia, are marked by gripping plots and compelling psychological analysis. Vesnicky˘ Román (1867; A Village Novel) explores the conflict between self and community in a general perspectivist framework that recognizes the relative nature of moral truth. Implicitly commenting on the political struggles of the time, Svetlá's later work has libertarian, anti-Catholic, and nationalist overtones.
Jakub Arbes, a journalist, adopted Émile Zola's theories of scientific naturalism and wrote sprawling novels analyzing the plight of the Czech urban working class. In the 1860s and 1870s, Arbes also wrote shorter works that...