Prague-Vienna, Prague-Berlin: The Hidden Geography of Czech Modernism

Abstract

In response to his banishment to barbaric Tomis, on the Black Sea, in 8 C.E., Ovid composed theTristia,entreaties to Emperor Augustus to permit his return to civilized Rome. Feeling equally alienated from fin-de-siècle Vienna, the Czech expatriate poet, Josef Svatopluk Machar, produced the slim collectionTristium Vindobona.One poem, “První dojmy” (First impressions), finds Machar's narrator and alter ego tormented by visions of an otherworldly and unattainable Prague. “Na Kahlenbergu” (On Kahlenberg) takes the narrator to the eponymous hill outside Vienna, where he invokes his distressed land to the north. The legacy of Habsburg dominion over the Czechs appears to him as a “wide and bloody path“ spanning historical battlegrounds from Diirnkrut, near Vienna, to the White Mountain, west of Prague. Czech critics in 1893 hailedTristiumas both a literary and a political event, its stature enhanced by its publication under the “shadow of bayonets,” that is, during an official state of emergency in Prague. The young critic Emanuel z Čenkova raised only an amicable objection in his review inLiterární listy:Machar's narrator could easily come home—eluding reverie and history—since “express trains cross like lightning” between Vienna and Prague.