Vltava Diverted: The Czech Crisis in Antonin Suva's "The River"
Vltava Diverted: The Czech Crisis in Antonin Suva's "The River"

Summary/Abstract: With the same restless energy that gripped post-Positivists all over Europe, the rebellious 1890s generation of Czech poets explored the topography of the inner life, the soul. Arts and literature in the Czech lands, and poetry in particular, evolved rapidly in those years. In the Realist verse of the late 1880s, social conventions and the prescriptive concept of national unity had begun to disintegrate under the merciless scrutiny of the newly liberated individual. At the same time, Czech Decadents expressed their alienation and a generalized ennui in their self-absorbed verse. With roots in both these poetic movements, the connections being personal as well as stylistic and thematic, Symbolism arose in the mid-1890s. The poem "Reka," ("The River," 1897) by Antonin Sova ( 1864-1928) is representative of the Symbolist wave, but, viewed as a response to Bedrich Smetana's Vltava, is unusually explicit in its defiance of the Czech cultural establishment. [...]

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