Czech literature
After the murder of Wenceslas III and the subsequent upheavals in the kingdom in 1306, however, the Bohemian nobles distanced themselves from German culture and looked for literature in their native language.
The Hussite period also developed the genre of Czech religious songs as a replacement for Latin hymns and liturgy, e.g. the Jistebnický kancionál, the Jistebnice Hymnal.
New literary devices incited scholars, e.g. Veleslavín, to construct a more complex grammatical structure, based on Latin, as well as an influx of loan words.
The largest personality of Czech evangelical baroque writing is John Comenius, who spent his youth in Bohemia but was forced into exile later in life.
The new national literature thus firstly mimicked popular German genres and would only later evolve into an independent creative effort; this was especially true for drama, e.g. Václav Kliment Klicpera.
It was during this period that the idea of a truly national literature and culture developed, as a rejection of Bernard Bolzano's vision of a bi-lingual and bi-cultural Czech-German state.
During this time period two main types of literature were produced: Biedermeier literature, which strove to educate the readers and encourage them to be loyal to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (e.g. Karel Jaromír Erben and Božena Němcová), and romanticism, which emphasized the freedom of the individual and focused on subjectivity and the subconscious (e.g. Karel Hynek Mácha, Václav Bolemír Nebeský.)
The year 1848 brought to the fore a new generation of Czech authors who followed in the footsteps of Mácha, and published their work in the new almanac Máj (May) (e.g. Vítězslav Hálek, Karolina Světlá and Jan Neruda).
They favored contemporary subjects over historical ones, and sought to deemphasize the personal voice of the author in comparison to the often highly colored speech of the characters.
The new generation of poets distanced themselves from both the neo-romantics and the modernists: led by S. K. Neumann, their work focused on concrete reality, free of any pathos, or complicated symbolism.
Many of the new poets (Karel Toman, Fráňa Šrámek, Viktor Dyk, František Gellner, Petr Bezruč) allied themselves with anarchism and the women's movement, although this influence waned throughout the decade.
In prose, the work of the modernist generation was only now coming into its own, but the different stylistic waves that affected their prose are also evident in the work of the new generation — naturalism (A. M. Tilschová); impressionism (Šrámek, Gellner, Jiří Mahen, Jan Opolský, Rudolf Těsnohlídek); the Vienna Secession (Růžena Svobodová, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic).
The first major theme of the interwar period was the war — the inhumanity, violence, and terror, but also the heroic actions of the Czech Legion (Rudolf Medek, Josef Kopta, František Langer, Jaroslav Hašek).
A new generation of poets ushered in the return of the avantgarde: poetry of the heart (early Jiří Wolker, Zdeněk Kalista) and naivism (Čapek brothers, Josef Hora, Jaroslav Seifert, and S. K. Neumann).
The avantgarde soon split, however, into the radical proletarian socialist and communist authors (Wolker, Neumann, Karel Teige, Antonín Matěj Píša, Hora, Jindřich Hořejší), the Catholics (Durych, Deml), and to the centrists (brothers Čapek, Dyk, Fischer, Šrámek, Langer, Jan Herben).
The drama of the time also followed the same stylistic evolution as poetry and prose — expressionism, followed by a return to realistic, civilian theater (František Langer, Karel Čapek).
This led the authors of the time to focus on public matters and spirituality; Catholicism gained in importance (Kalista, Karel Schulz, Halas, Vančura, Durych).
The German protectorate and World War II left its mark on Czech literature — many of the authors of the interwar generations did not survive or went into exile.
As a result of the war, all forms of literature turned even more toward tradition and history: poetry became more subdued, and greater emphasis was laid upon language as an expression of national identity (Hora, Halas, Seifert, Nezval), and on spirituality and religious values (Hrubín, Závada, Zahradníček, Holan).
1948 brought the ultimate victory of the Communists, and the subsequent end of civil freedoms — any literature contrary to the official perspective was banned and the authors persecuted.
Only at the end of the 1950s did the tight censorial control begin to ease — some poets were allowed to publish again (Hrubín, Oldřich Mikulášek, Jan Skácel) and a new literary group formed around the magazine Květen, striving to break the hold of socialist realism (Miroslav Holub, Karel Šiktanc, Jiří Šotola).
In prose, new authors abandoned polemics about socialism and instead turned toward personal and civic morality (Jan Trefulka, Milan Kundera, Ivan Klíma, Pavel Kohout), the theme of war and occupation (Jiří Weil, Arnošt Lustig), especially the fate of Jews.
Bohumil Hrabal became the most prominent of the contemporary prose authors, with his works full of colloquialisms and non-traditional narrative structures, and the absence of official moral frameworks.
The era of literary freedom and experiments, which reached its apogee during the Prague Spring of 1968, came to an abrupt end the same summer, with the Soviet invasion and subsequent "normalization."
Many authors fled to the U.S. and Canada (Josef Škvorecký), Germany (Peroutka), Austria (Kohout), France (M. Kundera), but they generally did not fare much better than their contemporaries in Czechoslovakia, largely due to the absence of a readership.
On the border between official and unofficial literature stood authors of historical novels (Korner, Karel Michal), and well as Bohumil Hrabal and Ota Pavel.
Memory and history were also chief motifs of samizdat literature (Karel Šiktanc, Jiřina Hauková), as were brutally honest, factual testimonials of daily life (Ivan Martin Jirous).
