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- Title
Auf dem Weg in die Moderne: Adolf Heyduks Idylle Oldřich a Božena.
- Authors
Ibler, Reinhard
- Abstract
The love story of the Přemyslid duke Oldřich (1012–1033, 1034) and the peasant girl Božena Křesinová, who became his second wife, was a popular subject in the Bohemian chronicles of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. The story's social and national connotations (Božena being a lower class Czech girl) may have been one of the main factors of its renewed popularity in Czech literature and art since the end of the 18th century. Especially the Czech National Revival gave birth to several works dealing with this topic, such as ballads, romances, dramas, operas and paintings. An absolutely different way of treating the subject was presented by Adolf Heyduk (1835–1923), a representative of the 'May School' (Májovci). In his idyll Oldřich a Božena (1879), Heyduk largely ignored the story's national and social implications and focussed on the love theme. Thus he was also in line with the Májovci poetics being directed against the revivalists' strictly nationalist and patriotic orientation in literature and culture. Heyduk, moreover, strengthened the work's symbolic and psychological dimensions, especially in an abundance of nature scenes and in Božena's songs giving an insight into the girl's hopes, dreams and latent desires. The work thus gains a new aesthetic quality bringing Oldřich a Božena close to modernistic conceptions.
- Subjects
SOCIAL conditioning; DUKES (Nobility); BALLAD (Literary form); GIRLS; HISTORY of poetics; 19TH century (Literary period)
- Publication
Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 2020, Vol 65, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0044-3506
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/slaw-2020-0001