Prolegomena k parnasismu
Prolegomena on Parnassianism

Summary/Abstract: The end of the 1870s and 1880s saw a development stage in 19th century Czech literature which used to be traditionally characterized as the Lumír-Ruch generation stage. This primarily involved poetic work represented by prominent authors who were the principal contributors to the literary journals Ruch and Lumír, which from the end of the 1860s and the first half of the 1870s focused on the main figures from this generation: Sládek, Čech, Vrchlický and Zeyer. A more recent view of this stage was opened up by an anthology from Moravian Bohemist Jaromír Fryčer, which came out under the title Neznámý Parnas – Unknown Parnassus (1988). It analysed the work of French poets who in the latter half of the 1860s appeared in the Parnasse contemporain journal and took up a critical stance towards Romantic poetry, due to its excessive formal and intellectual laxity, confronting it with the formal order and intellectual sophistication of their artistic works, as well as aesthetic discipline. In the Czech context these stylistic features attracted the attention of several younger poets and prose writers, who began to place emphasis in their work on aesthetic factors, which manifested themselves in an effort to achieve refinement in artistic form and intellectual depth and to expand artistic imagery. No matter how much their work differed (e.g. as regards their approach to subject matter – hence the traditional difference between the “nationalists” and “cosmopolitans”), common features can be found among them that are characteristic of them all (e.g. a stress on an aesthetic approach to form and material), presenting the opportunity to include them all under the common term Parnassianism. From a literary history standpoint it describes a particular transition stage that opened the way to modernism – symbolism, decadence and Secession. The term “Parnassianism” is used in Czech criticism of the period, particularly by F. X. Šalda. With the loss of a demand for a specific aesthetic standpoint over time it acquired a pejorative sense and came to be understood as a formally stilted stylistic artism, and a byword for outmodedness. It is sometimes identified without justification with neo-Romanticism.

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