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Between Karel Čapek and a Hard Brexit. Reflections on Robotics and Humanity

Author(s): Derek Sayer / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

Karel Čapek introduced the word robot to the languages of the world in his drama R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which premiered on 25 January 1921 at the National Theater in Prague. The word itself was coined by Karel’s older brother Josef, a cubist painter who created the stage-sets for the play. Etymology indelibly links robots with unfree labor, since robot comes from robota, the Czech word for the labor services Bohemian peasants owed their lords until 1848, when servile tenancies were abolished. A robot, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a machine with a human appearance or functioning like a human,” but the term has also come to be used inversely, to describe “a person who works mechanically and efficiently but insensitively.” [...]

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The Power of the Powerless Revisited

Author(s): Paul Wilson / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2018

This essay explores the paradoxical relationship between Václav Havel’s dramas and his essays, in particular, The Power of the Powerless. Havel’s plays aimed at creating a new community awareness of the “post-totalitarian” system in which people were trapped. His essays employ similar dramatic and analytic techniques to show a way out of that trap by “living within the truth,” that is, living in a way that exposes the mendacity of “post-totalitarianism” and spreads the virus of truth and change throughout society. The present essay argues that the ultimate aim of the “existential revolution” Havel calls for is in fact the regeneration and strengthening of civil society and the creation of institutions that serve people, not power. It concludes by looking at the continuing relevance of The Power of the Powerless today.

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The Shaman, the Greengrocer, and “Living in Truth”

Author(s): Jonathan Bolton / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2018

This article turns to Havel’s contemporaries in the Czech music underground to look at earlier uses of the phrase “living in truth.” I focus on Egon Bondy’s 1976 novel The Shaman, where truth is portrayed in mystical terms as a form of transcendence achieved through solitary spiritual training—a mental state that is divorced from political opposition. Havel repurposes the idea of “living in truth,” avoiding mystical notions in favor of civic engagement, but he also steers clear of the romance of “dissident stories” about people persecuted for such engagement. I explore why Havel’s famous story of the greengrocer is so weak on motivation; rather than painting a scene or creating a three-dimensional character, Havel gestures weakly at the greengrocer’s sudden transformation into an oppositional figure. Havel also consistently uses scare quotes around the phrase “living in truth,” registering his own discomfort with a phrase that is inspiring, yet plays into dissident clichés. I see The Power of the Powerless as delineating a version of dissident truth while remaining skeptical about its transmission; Havel skillfully mixes pathos and irony as he considers the role of “dissidents” caught between Czechoslovak realities and Western expectations.

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The Sacred and the Myth. Havel’s Greengrocer, Twenty Years Later

Author(s): Marci Shore / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2018

This essay juxtaposes two thinkers: the French literary critic and philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) and the Czech playwright, essayist, and dissident Václav Havel (1936–2011). In particular, the text examines Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless through the lens of Girard’s structuralist model of mimetic desire, violent sacrifice, and a cultural order sustained by prohibition, ritual, and myth. Arguing against the French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), Girard insisted on a reality behind the text: myths disclosed real victims. Girard and Havel shared a merciless anti-populism: society was guilty. They shared something else as well: in an age of a loss of faith in Marxism and all grand narratives, and of skepticism about the possibility of any stable meaning, subjectivity, and truth, Havel and Girard insisted on the ontological reality of both truth and lies, and on the ontological reality of the distinction between them.

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Czarno-zielone czasoprzestrzenie wyobrażone

Author(s): Leszek Drong / Language(s): Polish Issue: 38/2019

Review of: Leszek Drong - Karolina Pospiszil, Swojskość i utrata. Obrazy Górnego Śląska w literaturze polskiej i czeskiej po 1989 roku, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2016, s. 224. Oprawa twarda/miękka, publikacja polskojęzyczna.

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Václav Smyčka: Das Gedächtnis der Vertreibung. Interkulturelle Perspektiven auf deutsche und tschechische Gegenwartsliteratur und Erinnerungskulturen

Author(s): Elisa-Maria Hiemer / Language(s): German Issue: 3/2020

Review of: Elisa-Maria Hiemer - Václav Smyčka: Das Gedächtnis der Vertreibung. Interkulturelle Perspektiven auf deutsche und tschechische Gegenwartsliteratur und Erinnerungskulturen. transcript. Bielefeld 2019. 256 S., Ill. ISBN 978-3-8376-4386-2. (€ 34,99.)

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Współczesna czeska duchowość

Author(s): Irena Bogoczová / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2020

Artykuł przedstawi najbardziej typowe cechy religijności (oraz sekularyzacji) czeskiego społeczeństwa, wskaże na historyczno-polityczne źródła tej odmienności oraz tendencje jej rozwoju. Na podstawie odpowiedniej literatury fachowej, popularnonaukowej i zdecydowanie popularyzującej (a nawet rozrywkowej) opublikowanej w ciągu ostatnich 20–30 lat przez czeskich autorów (socjologów, teologów, psychologów, księży, katechetów, dziennikarzy itp.) artykuł przybliży (polskiemu) odbiorcy typ narracji używanej podczas omawiania tematów związanych z Bogiem, Biblią, Kościołem, wiarą, duchowością… W artykule zostaną przytoczone konkretne przykłady takiej narracji. Do przygotowania artykułu posłużyły prace takich badaczy, jak np. D. Červenková, P. Fiala, H. Hamplová, P. Hošek, Z. R. Nešpor, P. Říčan, O. I. Štampach, D. Václavík, R. Vido. Szczególna uwaga zostanie poświęcona publikacjom Tomáša Halíka (Ptal jsem se cest), Zbigniewa Czendlika (Postel, hospoda, kostel) oraz Alexandra Fleka (Parabible). Przedmiotem analizy jest sposób wyrażania się o Bogu (świętości), wierze, wierzących, księżach, Kościele. The present paper introduces the most typical features of religiosity (and secularization) in Czech society, pointing out their historical-political origins and the tendencies in their development. Based on relevant professional, scientific-popular and unambiguously popular (entertaining) literature produced by Czech authors (sociologists, theologians, psychologists, priests, journalists, etc.) over the last 20-30 years, the contribution will familiarize Polish readers with the type of narrative used in works on God, the Bible, the Church, faith, mysticism, etc., providing concrete examples of such discourse. Writings by researchers such as Červenková, P. Fiala, H. Hamplová, P. Hošek, Z. R. Nešpor, P. Říčan, O. I. Štampach, D. Václavík, R. Vido were used for the paper. Special attention is devoted to works by Tomáš Halík (Ptal jsem se cest), Zbigniew Czendlik (Postel, hospoda, kostel) and Alexander Flek (Parabible). The subject of the analysis is the way of Czech and Polish authors express themselves when writing on the themes of God (holiness/sacrum), faith, believers, priests, and the Church.

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Obraz sacrum w utworach śpiewanych młodzieży na Zaolziu.

Author(s): Urszula Kolberová / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2020

The subject of the present paper are the lyrics of the songs sung by Catholic youth from Zaolzie or, more precisely, the emerging image of the sacred (God, Jesus, Mary and man's attitude towards the sacred), which is presented to young people in borderland areas. The research method used to analyse the collected material is based on the methodology of the linguistic picture of the world. The image of the sacred in Polish and Czech songs in Zaolzie contains the generally known image of God, Jesus and Mary. God is above all good, almighty, eliminates sins, is infinite, is a father and guardian for man, and man should love him as the Creator. Similarly, Jesus is merciful and through him leads the way to God and salvation.Mary, on the other hand, is worshipped primarily as the Mother of Jesus and Mother of us,people. This generally known image of the sacred is repeated and consolidated thanks to the songs. Polish and Czech texts do not differ significantly from each other in the general presentation of the sacred and its image, but we can notice some differences, such as references to Mary as the Queen of Poland, and the generally stronger picture of Mary in Polish texts.

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“He Couldn’t Tell the Difference between The Merry Widow and Tristan and Isolde”: Kafka’s Anti-Wagnerian Philosophy of Music

Author(s): Ido Lewit / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

This essay exposes an anti-Wagnerian philosophy of music in Franz Kafka’s “Researches of a Dog” and “The Silence of the Sirens.” Themes of music, sound, and silence are overwhelmingly powerful in these stories and cannot be divorced from corporeal and visual aspects. These aspects are articulated in the selected texts in a manner that stands in stark opposition to Richard Wagner’s philosophy of music as presented in the composer’s seminal 1870 “Beethoven” essay.

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Handbook of Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust Fiction. Works and Contexts. A Short Introduction to the Project with Two Entries

Author(s): Štěpán Balík,Agata Firlej,Elisa-Maria Hiemer,Jiří Holý,Hana Nichtburgerová / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Handbook of Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust Fiction is a work in progress aiming at becoming a standard reference work addressed to universities and public libraries and the broader public. It includes novels, short stories, poems and plays written in Polish, Czech and Slovak within the scope of 650 standard pages. The table of contents consists of 53 articles focused on Polish, 45 articles on Czech, and 23 articles on Slovak literature. The editors provide an introduction about the main developments of Holocaust literature in the broader context of three lands: crucial topics, situations, characters, motifs and places, periodization due to political changes, reception processes in the national and transnational context. The Handbook aims primarily at the researchers and readers in Western Europe and the U.S. where the Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust fiction remains largely unknown. The project results from the cooperation among researchers from Polish, Czech, German and Slovak universities. This article presents two entries from Polish and Czech literature.

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Świat nowego mitu: Siostra Jáchyma Topola

Author(s): Piotr Gierowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2020

Sestra by Jáchym Topol is one of the most important Czech novels, which were published after the year 1989. It describes the new reality of the 1990s as a generational experience with the distinctive mythological features. The paper will be an attempt to describe the process of the mythologization of the fictional world and to indicate its distinguishing features and means of creation of myth-like universe. A special attention is directed to the questions of the intertextual links between Topol’s novel and a poem Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire and the problem of literary Cubism.

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Road to a New Self: Urban Environment in the Reimagination of a Migrant’s Identity in Gimme the Money by Iva Pekarkova

Author(s): Alina Ielisieieva / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

There is no other place in the world where the impact of migration is more vivid than in the streets of New York City, which is often considered to be one of the greatest cultural centers, that has been welcoming immigrants from all over the world. It is precisely them, labourers, business owners, taxi drivers, who by being the essential part of New York City’s diversity are constantly redefining its identity and whose own identities are being transformed and reimagined through the interaction with the city. In Gimme the Money Iva Pekarkova turns to New York City in order to show the immigrant identity as an identity in movement by making a leading character cruising around the city as a cab lady and by referring to the city both as to the exterior setting and the interior landscape of the leading character’s mind. The paper will offer the analysis of the personal transformation of the heroine, who because of the persistent sense of dislocation and constant observation of the city reimagines herself by relating to New York City’s streets and by becoming the part of the community of urban residents finds herself a new home.

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Prevod kot kulturni in literarni artefakt. Primerjava dveh čeških prevodov Prešernove pesmi „Slovo od mladosti”

Author(s): Alenka Jensterle-Doležal / Language(s): Slovenian Issue: 1/2021

In the paper we analyze and compare two translations of Prešeren’s poem Slovo od mladosti (Farewell to youth) as cultural and literary artifacts. We focus on linguistic and stylistic solutions as well as decisions in the context of cultural transfer. First, we research the translation by František L. Čelakovski (1799—1852), published in 1832 in the newspaper Časopis českého Museum from the period of romanticism, and second, the translation of the same Prešeren’s poem by Josef Hiršal (1920—2003), a famous poet of experimental poetry and a well-known Czech translator of his time, published in the book Můj sen šel po hladině (My dream faded on the water surface, 1978). We emphasize on Hiršal's translation from the period of the Czech experimental poetry from the sixtieth and seventieth.

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O procesu překladu. Struktury a koincidence

Author(s): Hanna Herrmannová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2013

Translations of poetry have their own characteristics. The question is not only to preserve the meaning, but also rythm, aliteration, melody or atmosphere of original. Between Czech and Romanian language exists some kind of phonetic and lexical coincidences which are usually given by principles of etymology. Translator can also meet some accidental coincidences. Overall view on the structure of poem allows the conscious use of both of them.

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Mainstream si experiment în cadrul culturii cehe, cu aplicaţie pe domeniul cinematografiei. Un (Nou) Nou Val al filmului ceh?

Author(s): Mircea Dan Duţă / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2013

This material is aiming to present the role of the mainstream within the Czech culture through the field of the cinema industry, because that’s where the force and the importance of the mainstream are more obvious than anywhere else. Of course the mainstream is not specific only to the field of cinema: the history of the Czech literature, theatre, music or plastic arts proves that “the strong and sane middle stream” addressed more or less directly to the “art consumer/ receiver” has always been dominant within all those fields of the Czech culture and much more present than the intellectual art, the experimental and “new wave like” movements, which addressed only a limited circle of initiated people. On another hand, we wouldn’t like to diminish the role of the experimental art: it is well known and true the fact that the Czech art and culture are internationally famous mainly because of the intellectual and new wave like movements, while the mainstream authors and creation are known rather to the Czech audience in the respective historical era. Therefore we present some examples of experimental movements that became internationally famous especially in the field of literature, theatre and cinema. (Actually the Czech cinema became famous mainly because of the very “non-mainstream” Czech and Slovak New Wave in the 60s of the 20th century.) In short, we don’t intend to deny the role of the experiment, but to stress the importance of the mainstream that does not deserve being forgotten. Our main arguments concern mainly the Czech film mainstream in the 30s of the 20th century and after the year 1993, when the Czech Republic became an independent state, but contains also a short comment about the already mentioned Czech New Wave in the 60s.

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Přínos soluňských bratří pro slavistická a etymologická bádání

Author(s): Ilona Janyšková,Helena Karlikova / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2013

In the year of the celebration of 1150 years since the arrival of Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius to Great Moravia, the cultural dimension of their work in Great Moravia is being stressed. In connection with this anniversary a lot of events take place in our country: exhibitions, seminars, conferences, concerts, public lectures, divine services, educational and interactive programs for children and adolescents, production of interesting publications, competitions and so on. All of these events have a clear goal – to make the public aware of the contribution of Cyril and Methodius’ mission to our culture and learning, not only in the context of Moravia or the Czech Republic, but also in the context of the wide Slavonic area. The most important ones will be mentioned in the paper. However, from the perspective of us, linguists, there is very little talk about the Old Church Slavonic language, which is particularly surprising in the context of this great anniversary. This impression is amplified when we look at the calendar of events of the Cyril-Methodius celebrations within the whole Czech Republic which completely fail to mention the importance of Cyril and Methodius as the creators of the oldest Slavonic literary language, and the contribution of Old Church Slavonic for the contemporary linguistic research. The importance of Old Church Slavonic as the oldest Slavonic literary language will be illustrated with numerous examples in the paper; special attention will be given to features that are important for Romanian linguistics, too. It will in particular concern the expansion, that is, the introduction of Church Slavonic words to Old or Archaic Romanian.

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Uniunea artistică „Devětsil”

Author(s): Diana Popescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2013

The artistic union Devětsil was the most important cultural Czech inter-war group. The name literally translates to nine forces, the nine its founders, but Devětsil is the Czech name for the butterbur plant (Petasites hybridus). This association of avant-garde artists was founded in 1920 in Prague and activated till 1930. Members published several art magazines like ReD, Disk, Pásmo and organized a lot of exhibitions.

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Profesorul Tiberiu Pleter la 80 de ani

Author(s): Anca Irina Ionescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 3/2012

Scientific-Life: Profesorul Tiberiu Pleter la 80 de ani (Anca Irina Ionescu)

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Pavel Josef Šafařík, savantul slovac de expresie cehă

Author(s): Anca Irina Ionescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 4/2011

Pavel Josef Šafařík was a Slovak philologist, poet and one of the first scientists to study Slavs and their origin in Europe. He was also a literary historian and ethnographer. His main work was Slovanské starožitnosti (1837-1865, Prague) [Slavonic Antiquities], the first important research on the culture and history of the Slavs, describing their settlements, origin and languages. He is also one of the first scientists to get an interest in the language and history of the Romanians and their relations with the Slav populations thus marking the beginning of the Czech-Romanian literary and scientific relations.

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Receptarea cehă a lui Mircea Eliade în condiţiile hiatului comunist

Author(s): Gabriel Mareş / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2011

Après une absence presque absolue jusque dans les années quatre-vingts, par la publication de Mademoiselle Christina (inclue dans le volume Pět rumunských novel - 1984) este lancé un processus de réception soutenue de Mircea Eliade. Cela se passe toutefois dans une période pendant laquelle le venin de la censure totalitaire n’avait pas été encore épuisé. La rythmicité avec laquelle est maintenant traduite en tchèque l’œuvre d’Eliade (sont, par exemple, publiées les nouvelles Chez les Tziganes (1985) et Le serpent (1986), tandis qu’en 1989 est publié le livre Bengálská noc qui comprend les romans La nuit bengali et Noces au paradis) démontre une attitude préméditée et, surtout, systématique. Cependant, dans la présentation et l’interprétation de la personnalité créatrice d’Eliade l’accent est encore mis sur sa qualité de prosateur. Aucun ouvrage sur l’histoire de la religion n’est officiellement pas publié en tchèque avant 1989. Une spécificité de la réception d’Eliade consiste dans sa manifestation non seulement à un niveau officiel, mais aussi dans la dimension culturelle prohibée. Dans le cas de cet auteur roumain, le processus de réception est, par conséquent, l’un des plus complets de toute la période totalitaire. Le vide représenté par l’absence, sur le marché littéraire tchèque, des œuvres littéraires d’Eliade interdites par le Parti communiste de Tchécoslovaquie (KSČ) est complété, même si dans une mesure limitée, par les écrits parus sous forme de samizdat et en exil. Il s’agit surtout des articles signés par le poète dissident Jan Vladislav (tant en exil – la revue Národní politika, que sous forme de samizdat - dans le cahier Tajný čtenář v Paříži), par le critique de théâtre Anna Freimanová (dans la revue samizdat O divadle) et par Karel Gelnar (dans Reportér – magazine politique et littéraire de l’exil tchèque de Suisse).

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