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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Public Interface | Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Oral literature : Czech

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Traditions Popular culture (Oral literature) Czech František Ladislav Čelakovský (c. 1839) Karel Jaromír Erben (c. 1868) Dobiáš, Dalibor

Modern interest in oral literature took hold in the Bohemian Lands in the late 18th century, gathered speed in 1800-20, and remained operative throughout the century. Initially this interest involved both German- and emerging Czech-language literary cultures. Already in the 1770s, the Viennese Michael Denis, who had translated Ossian into German and who was familiar with the Hasanaginica, called for the collection of ancient Slavic lays, including Bohemian ones; the Prague-based scholar and writer August Gottlieb Meißner (1753–1807), a Herder adept, published “Einige Volkslieder aus dem vorigen Jahrhundert” (1794; in his magazine Apollo), which saw in the remains of German folk songs, in accordance with the historical interest of the time, “a characteristic of our former customs and way of thinking”. He discussed them also as an esthetic inspiration and offered some examples.

Early interest in Czech oral literature was evinced by scholars and collectors such as Josef Vratislav Monse (1733–1793), Josef Dobrovský, and Jan Jeník z Bratřic (1756–1845). The collection of proverbs, Českých přísloví sbírka (1804), published by Dobrovský and Antonín Pišely (1758–1806) on the basis of older sources, connected the material with a Slavic cultural heritage. At the same time, contemporary writers, such as Prokop Šedivý, Sebestián Hněvkovský, and Josef Heřman Agapit Gallaš, drew inspiration from oral literature as a model for addressing their public. Similarly, battle songs from the Napoleonic Wars shifted from celebrating monarchs and commanders to a more homely register (e.g. Joseph Georg Meinert and Bedřich Diviš Weber, Nationalgesänge der Böhmen, 1800).

In the long run, however, the interest of the Czechs was increasingly directed towards Slavic literature, because the available collections gave only a limited idea of Czech folklore while Russian or South Slavic editions had already gained international renown. Czech had no oral epic of the type that Vuk Stefanović Karadžić had collected in Serbian, and fairy-tale interest, as pioneered by the Grimm brothers, was strongest among German authors; hence, the impact of Macpherson and Herder steered Czechs into an interest in Slavic literary history. Dobrovský and his circle studied and commented on The tale of Igor’s campaign around 1810; Václav Hanka, who occasionally attended the Vienna-based philological circle of Jernej Kopitar, translated Serbian and Russian ballads. It was Hanka who, in 1814, propounded the importance of Slavic oral literature for the development of modern Czech literature, calling for the collection and publication of Czech folk songs. He gained fame as a successful adept of folk-style songs (some of his productions gaining widespread popularity in their own right). In 1817 Pavol Jozef Šafárik repeated Hanka’s call, extolling the artistic value of oral literature with reference to Herder and Goethe.

The first large collection of oral literature from the Bohemian Lands, was, however, in German: Der Fylgie: Alte teutsche Volkslieder in der Mundart des Kühländchens by J.G. Meinert (1817). Meinert would in 1819 go on to furnish an influential interpretation of the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové, purportedly discovered – but actually forged – by Hanka’s circle. In the introduction to his folk-song collection, Meinert presented the songs in terms of Germanic antiquity and the ancient Germanic bards, interpreting them as a fountain of linguistic and ethnographic knowledge, and emphasized their present-day value. Editorially, Meinert followed Arnim/Brentano’s  Des Knaben Wunderhorn in presenting purified versions. His collection, and also the editions by Slovak writers (e.g. Písně světské lidu slovenského v Uhřích, “Secular songs of the Slovak folk in Hungary”, 1823/1827, by Šafárik, Ján Kollár and others) inspired Czech authors like František Ladislav Čelakovský.

Following the collection of the oral literature of the Habsburg Empire (carried out in the Bohemian Lands in 1819-23), Johann Ritter von Rittersberg (1780–1841) published his collection České národní písně (“Czech folk songs”, 1825). It presented song as a record of the nation’s inner life; however, as the approach is documentary and not programmatically bound to one language, the collection also includes urban folklore in Czech and German. Rittersberg’s collection was subsequently criticized by Anton Müller, and Karel Jaromír Erben. In the process, a national-classical type of Czech song was established, which betrays the values of the Biedermeier period and imputes to the Czech nation a great love of festive conviviality. A more complex panorama was presented by Čelakovský’s Slovanské národní písně (“Slavic folk songs”, 1822-27; dedicated to Hanka), which was indebted to Kollár and Šafárik in its vision of Slavic and Baltic songs as instances of mutual cultural connection, and manifests a literary rather than merely sentimental interest in Czech folk song.

Czech and Slavic song became one of the major sources of pre-1848 Czech patriotic poetry with its popular outreach, following Čelakovský’s Ohlas písní ruských, (“Echoes of Russian songs”, 1829) and Ohlas písní českých, (“Echoes of Czech songs”, 1840). His friend Josef Vlastimil Kamarýt (1797–1833) collected and himself wrote national-religious songs (e.g. České národní duchovní písně, 1831-32). Other authors, such as Josef Jaroslav Langer and Karel Hynek Mácha, used folk songs as a Romantic verse form for lyrical poetry. František Sušil’s Moravské národní písně (“Moravian folk songs”, 1835-60) represented “all the counties where Moravian is spoken” and initially followed the esthetic line of interest. The most important folklorist of the period, Karel Jaromír Erben, invigorated the field with his collections Písně národní v Čechách (“Folk songs in Bohemia”, 1842-45), which emphasized hitherto unknown Czech folk epic, and Prostonárodní české písně a říkadla (“Popular Czech songs and nursery proverbs”, 1864).

The 1830s and 1840s were markedly affected by the brothers Grimm’s fairy tale collection and by their mythological theories. The vernacular genres now came to include oral prose tales (fairy-tales, legends, etc.). Besides the German-language fairy tales (e.g. by Wolfgang Adolph Gerle, 1819), mention should be made of the collections by Božena Němcová (Národní báchorky a pověsti, “Folk tales and legends”, 1845-47; Slovenské pohádky a pověsti, “Slovak fairy-tales and legends”, 1857-58, collected in Slovakia). These tales are not only records of stories which Němcová could hear in various places in Bohemia and Upper Hungary, but also express the author’s interest in idealized interpersonal relationships. They also indicate an encounter between the genre of the idyll, by now firmly established in Czech literature, and emerging Realism. Alongside Němcová’s Slovak fairy tales and some translations, oral-literature interest is also attested in Beneš Method Kulda’s work on Moravian fairy tales and legends.

Erben’s collection of prose tales was published posthumously, as České pohádky (“Czech fairy-tales”,1904). Despite his Romantic mindset, Erben (unlike Němcová) used a scholarly approach to oral literature. Following the theory of the brothers Grimm, he sought in his editions to reconstruct the original forms of oral literature as a source of the customs and morals of the nation. Erben’s own ballads, Kytice z pověstí národních (“Garland of national legends”, 1853), showcases, at the same time, the culmination of orality’s impact on 19th-century writing. Based as they were on intimate knowledge of oral literature and thus apparently timeless, they sought to expressed the moral values of the nation. However, they met with criticism of more radical contemporaries.

Written literature developed into a more Realist direction after 1860 and lost its taste for estheticized oral poetry and prose, notwithstanding the occasional return to the oral register by Josef Vaclav Sládek (1845-1912), Svatopluk Čech (1846–1908), and Jaroslav Vrchlický (1853–1912). Characteristically, these writings tended not to include urban folklore. On the other hand, within the wider Central European context new scientific methods gained currency in folklore studies; in Czech oral literature we encounter the name of Julius Feifalik, who in the 1850s studied folk drama and advanced a fundamental (albeit not generally accepted) critique of the putative oral origin of the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové.

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1.5.1.1/b https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462981188/ngVC6l16hVsR3GiKOWuRfCuf https://e-rn.ie/czc-3