Birth of a language
The history of languages is always fascinating because they trace the movements of populations, long before our era, and are themselves part of a long lineage. Thus, we must first evoke the "common trunk", this proto-Slavic stemming from Indo-European, then a historical figure, Rastislav, king of Great Moravia in the 9th century, who had the vocation to evangelize his country. To do this, he asked Constantinople to send him a Christian mission composed of two brothers who were to become saints, Cyril and Methodius, who brought with them the bases of an alphabet they had composed, Glagolitic (which itself would be used to establish Cyrillic), with which they undertook to translate the Bible. Inspired by their own dialect but wanting to make themselves intelligible to the inhabitants of their host region, they gave birth to Old Slavonic, which certainly did not dethrone Latin (especially since Great Moravia was dismantled), but which nevertheless endured, more and more vigorously. This is why the oldest texts - legends of Wenceslas and liturgical chants - are written in these two languages. In addition, the Codex Gigas, the so-called Devil's Bible, which mixes idioms and must have been completed around 1230, as well as the Zbraslav Chronicle, begun by Otto of Thuringia but completed by Peter of Zittau (c. 1275-1339), should be mentioned, which is of great historical and literary value
In the Middle Ages, Czech also began to break away from Old Slavic. Thus, while the first words in this language appear in an administrative text from 1057 (the Charter of Litoměřice), it is accepted that the first text written entirely in Czech is the Chronicle of Dalimil, a partial translation of earlier works written in Latin, and perhaps commissioned by Charles IV (1316-1378), the same man who wanted a version of the Bible in his language. Everything is indeed the will of men, and thus the theologian and philosopher Thomas de Stíné also contributed to the written form of his language in his works, including Dialogue of the Father and Children (1385), and foreshadowed the work of Jan Hus, who would be decisive. This preacher, born in 1372 in Husinec, was excommunicated for heresy and was burned at the stake in 1415, a fate that earned him a place among the martyrs of free thought. A brilliant student, his legacy in grammar is undeniable and he is credited with De orthographia bohemia, which perfects the work on the alphabet of Cyril and Methodius, and will in turn influence the Grammar of Námest' (1533), the first work of this type to take the Czech language as its subject
For the time being, the Hussite wars continued to shake early fifteenth-century Bohemia, so writings were mainly devoted to philosophical questions - as in the monumental Tkadleček, an anonymous work that questions free will - or theological questions, as addressed by Petr Chelčicky (c. 1390-1460), who advocated a return to the original values of the church and non-violence. With the coming 16th century, humanism developed in turn, embodied first in the work of Bohuslav Hasištejnský z Lobkovic (1461-1510) - a great traveler proclaimed poeta laureatus and author of a satire of Bohemian life(As sanctum Vanceslaum satira, 1489) -, and especially in that of Jan Blahoslav (1523-1571). Blahoslav belonged to the Unitas fratrum, the "unity of the brothers" created after the words of Jan Hus, but he did not devote all of his writings to this community, although he revised the first books of the Acta Unitatis fratrum and undertook a Czech translation of the New Testament, which certainly inspired the Czech brothers with the idea of the famous Kralice Bible, this was based on Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts (and not Latin as in the first translations) and was printed in six volumes from 1579 to 1593. Blahoslav was a highly educated man and composed numerous works on pedagogy and morals as well as on liturgical music. After his death, Comemius - born Jan Amos Komenský in Moravia in 1592 - would continue in this vein. He was also a member of the Czech Brothers, and throughout his life he encouraged an egalitarian education, believing that the fact that everyone - and everyone! - to be awake to the world around them is the only answer to the crisis that was shaking Europe at the time. Although paradoxically the opposite of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, he is considered one of the fathers of modern pedagogy. Prolix, he wrote many works including a school manual for the youngest - Janua linguarum reserata - which will count no less than forty editions during his lifetime, and more than a hundred after his death in 1670.
The National Renewal
While the Baroque movement was unfolding under the pen of Adam Václav Michna (1600-1676), a composer of religious songs, and under that of Fridrich Bridel (1619-1680), a priest known for his lives of saints, Bohuslav Balbín (1621-1688) set about theorizing it in Versimilia humanorium disciplinarium, which met with great success. A patriot and defender of his language, this Jesuit teacher was a precursor of the Slavonic trend that would take off in the following century, first of all thanks to a man born in Hungary in 1753 and educated in German, but whose encounter with Czech during his studies at Havlíčkuv Brod was to be a revelation: Josef Dobrovský, who published a grammar and was commissioned by the Bohemian Academy of Sciences to search for manuscripts that had been dispersed during the Thirty Years' War, a task that was continued by Václav Hanka (1791-1861), some of whose finds caused controversy (the manuscripts of Dvur Kralové and Zlená Hora turned out to be forgeries). Josef Dobrovský took František Palacký under his wing and encouraged him to write about the past, a work that was published from 1836 to 1867 under the title History of the Czech People in Bohemia and Moravia, first in German and then in translation. The author later became involved in politics, becoming president of the Slavic Parliament in Prague in 1848. Despite the pressure exerted on him because of his commitment to Czech culture - he advocated the creation of a National Theater, which finally opened its doors in 1881 -
he remained active until his death in 1876. Many of them took part in what was to be called the National Revival, a logical continuation of Slavonicism and a forerunner of Romanticism, which knew how to be patriotic. It is worth mentioning Josef Jungmann (1773-1847), who published the first Czech-German dictionary in five volumes (and 120,000 entries) between 1834 and 1839, and who initiated the publication Krok, Pavel Jozef Šafárik (1795-1861), who became a linguist and ethnographer, František Ladislav Čelakovský (1799-1852), who held the chair of philology, and Josef Kajetán Tyl (1808-1856), who, in addition to historical works, wrote the Czech national anthem Kde domov můj?. Božena Němcová, who was born in Vienna in 1820 but breathed her last in Prague in 1862, collected tales and legends, but above all acquired a real posterity with her novel Babička(Grandmother), still read today. As for Karel Hynek Mácha, he gained fame with his romantic poem Mai, which inspired the creation of a "school", the Májovi, to which Karel Jaromír Erben, the author of Kytice z povestí národních(Bouquet of National Poems), was affiliated, Jan Neruda(The Tales of Mala Strana) and Karel Havlíček Borvsky (1821-1956), a journalist and poet whose work(Obrazy z Rus, Scenes from Russia, in 1843) already foreshadowed the realism that was to emerge and become naturalism in the drama Marysa (1894), which Vilém Mrstik (1863-1912) set in rural Moravia.The twentieth century turns
A new generation tried to free itself from German influence but was willingly open to European currents, following the example of symbolism, which inspired Antonín Sova (1864-1928), Otokar Březina (1868-1929), who eight times was approached for the Nobel Prize without ever obtaining it, or Karel Hlaváček, a poet who died of tuberculosis at the age of 23 in 1898, already associated with "fin de siècle" decadentism, just like Julius Zeyer (1841-1901), who had joined the Lumírovci school, which was more oriented towards aesthetic questions than the Májovi school. But here, as elsewhere, the first world conflict was already inviting, yet it did not refrain this intellectual renewal since it inspired Jaroslav Hašek's famous Adventures of the Brave Soldier Švejk (Folio editions), which camped out the absurdity of war, and pushed Karel Čapek (1890-1938) to turn to science fiction, a genre he used to better denounce his concerns (from his play R.U.R. in 1920 where he invented the term "robot" to The War of the Salamanders, Cambourakis editions, where he again explores the theme of enslavement). It was also during the interwar period that the avant-garde group Devetsil emerged - within which "poetism" unfolded, a worthy offshoot of Dadaism - and which included Vladislav Vančura (A Capricious Summer, Ginkgo editions), the poet Jaroslav Seifert, the future Nobel Prize winner in 1984, the novelist Vítězslav Nezval (Prague with Rainy Fingers
, Manifesto editions!), Julius Fučík, František Halas or Jindřich Štyrský, founder of the "Liberated Theater" (Osvobozené divadlo).The best known is of course Franz Kafka, who, through history, was born an Austrian in Prague on July 3, 1883 and died a Czechoslovakian near Vienna forty years later. His mother tongue was German, and he used it to write the few texts that have come down to us thanks to his friend Max Brod, who did not respect his last wishes asking him to destroy them after his death, notably The Trial (1925) and The Castle
(1926), unfortunately unfinished. Alas, the Second World War will sound the death knell of this effervescence, especially since it will be followed by a long and complex period where the country will be under the yoke of the USSR and where some writers will have to go into exile. The activities of the Group 42 were banned in 1948, while Egon Hostovský (whose novel Midnight's Vertigo inspired Clouzot for his film The Spies) left his country again. The relationship between Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) and his government was also very complicated: hit by censorship after the "Prague Spring", his works could only circulate clandestinely in the form of "samizdats". His most popular novel, Une trop bruyante solitude, is available in paperback from Robert Laffont. But the best-known Czech author of the 20th century is undoubtedly Milan Kundera, born in 1929 in Brno, especially since he has strong ties to France, which offered him a nationality when he became stateless in 1979, after fleeing the country four years earlier. His work - whether written directly in French from 1993 onwards or translated from Czech by him - includes a number of classics such as The Joke, The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Slowness, and is available in its entirety from Gallimard. With the "Velvet Revolution" in 1989 and the arrival in power of a poet-dramatist, Václav Havel (1936-2011), the straitjacket was completely loosened and the writings that had been censored until then were finally able to be freely published, and even to begin exporting again. Although they are still too rare on the shelves of our bookstores, the writers of the new generations (after 1960) show a beautiful vigor that gives hope for a final revival.
