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INTRODUCTORY
ОглавлениеIt sounds incredible, yet it is literally true, that every Slavic nation was, before the war, and probably still is, better known to the English speaking people than the Bohemians (Čechs). What is the reason? That the Bohemians, who are the most literate of all the Slavs, have remained undiscovered may be attributed to three main causes: They are not a free nation. They are a landlocked nation. They are rated a small nation.
The opportunities which a seacoast offers to a people, to mention the Dutch, Irish, Belgians, Norwegians, Swedes and Danes, all of whom are numerically smaller than the Bohemian-Slovaks are inestimable. In the forum of world’s commerce and politics, the sea is their powerful sponsor. To a landlocked people this great boon is denied. Inland nations may reach the outside world through an intermediary only, and if that intermediary happens to be a powerful and ungenerous state, the policy of which is to keep its little neighbor in the background, the consequences are obvious.
That there live in Central Europe Teutons and none others but Teutons was being daily demonstrated to the Americans by a most convincing proof. Almost every box of merchandise shipped here from that part of the world bore the tell-tale mark “Made in Germany.” Rarely one saw at the terminals goods labelled “Made in Austria,” and rarer still, “Made in Bohemia.” And yet many an article of merchandise thus marked was really made in Bohemia, for parts of Bohemia teem with all kinds of wonderful industries.
Because of centuries of political and economic subjection, the very existence of the nation has been lost sight of by the Anglo-Saxons. In the interval between the catastrophal defeat of the Bohemians in 1620 and 1848, the year of revolutionary changes, nothing has occurred in Bohemia to attract the attention of the world to the Bohemian nation. The Seven Years’ War, and later the Napoleonic Wars, were events that concerned not Bohemia as an independent state, but the whole of the Hapsburg Empire. The Russians acquired renown in the first quarter of the nineteenth century by their defeat of Napoleon. Later, during the Crimean War, Russia again came into prominence in the Anglo-American press. Kosciuszko and Pulaski were names to be conjured with by the Polish immigrant. The uprisings in 1830 and in 1863 made sufficiently known to the Americans the ideals and the miseries of Poland. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and the Berlin Congress following it made the English reader familiar with the geography and political ambitions of the Balkan Slavs. The Serbs, the Bulgars, the Montenegrines were successively introduced to the newspaper man and through him to the public at large. Alone the Bohemians remained undiscovered, unknown.
Before the war the average reader did not know where Bohemia was located with respect to Austria-Hungary. That ethnically, there might be a difference between a Čech, Hungarian and an Austrian he suspected, yet it was not wholly clear to him wherein the dissimilarity lay. One could cite countless instances of astonishing naiveté concerning the history of the nations which inhabit central and southeastern Europe. Four years ago a journalist and a writer who served on the western front in the capacity of a war correspondent made the astounding discovery that “the ancient Czech (Bohemian) language still continues to be spoken in Prague.” It would no doubt amuse a Dutchman to read that “Dutch is still spoken in Amsterdam”; yet transpose Dutch for Bohemian and Prague for Amsterdam and the analogy is precise. When one remembers with what fine scorn an American looked down upon that corner of Europe, which in his opinion exhibited altogether too many superfluous boundary dots, one begins to realize what thankless, almost futile task it was to talk to him of the trials, ambitions and triumphs of the Bohemian O’Connells, Emmets, Shelleys, Macauleys and Hallams. With the rest, the Bohemians had to pay the penalty of being thought a small nation.
Again there are the Bohemians and bohemians and how to differentiate between the two is still a puzzle to a considerable portion of the public. Are all the Bohemians artists, who “secede from conventionality in life and art”? That even cultured—let us not hope educated—Americans and Englishmen entertain the weird notion that there exists some distant relationship between Bohemians, bohemians and gypsies, is, alas, too true. In the novel Strathmore, Louise de la Ramée (Ouida) for instance, asserts quite seriously that gypsies in Bohemia have Slavonic features, that their language is a dialect of the Bohemian and that the “lawless, vagrant, savage race” is a Slavic tribe domiciled in Bohemia.
Not a few are misled by the term Czech, thinking it probably signifies a people other than the Bohemians. A New York paper, in enumerating the disaffected races of Austria-Hungary, named the Bohemians and the Czechs. This is precisely like saying Yankees and Americans or Germans and Teutons, for, as informed readers are aware Bohemians and the Czechs are one and the same.[1]
Of the continental nations, Germany excepted, the French were the first to look inquiringly into the queer Austrian household. No doubt they were led to study Slavic Austria largely because of their alliance with Russia and because of their historical friendship for the Poles. Due to the labor of three pioneers, Saint-René Taillandier (1817-1879), Louis Leger (1843-) and Ernest Denis (1849-) La Nation Tchèque is no longer unknown in France. Other and younger Frenchmen,—to name one, André Chéradame, the author of the widely quoted volume, The Pangerman Plot Unmasked,—continue the apostolary work in France; but Taillandier, Leger and Denis will always be honored as the pioneers of this propaganda. Of the trio, Ernest Denis, Professor of the Sorbonne, stands closest to the Bohemian heart. Denis’ monumental researches, Huss et la Guerre des Hussites, La Bohême depuis la Montagne Blanche, and Fin de l’indépendance Bohême, when published, may be said to have caused a sensation. Unhampered by the censor, Denis was able to bring out facts of Bohemia’s past which were a revelation to the Bohemians themselves.
The Anglo-Saxon who visited the Hapsburg dominions thirty or forty years ago was yet unable to see anything but Teuton Austria; that is to say, he looked at Bohemia and the other Austrian states wholly from the official viewpoint of Vienna.
As a sample of the notions of Bohemia and the Čechs professed in America and England a generation ago, suffice it to cite a passage or two from Bayard Taylor’s Views A-Foot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff: “The very name of Bohemia is associated with wild and wonderful legends, of the rude barbaric ages. The civilized race, the Saxon race, was left behind; I saw around me the features and heard the language of one of those rude Slavonian tribes whose original home was on the vast steppes of Central Asia(!)” Again: “In passing the shrines by the wayside, the poor degraded peasants always uncovered or crossed themselves, but it appeared to be rather the effect of habit than any good impulse for the Bohemians are noted all over Germany for their dishonesty....”
Taylor’s grossly distorted appraisal of Bohemia was not shared by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as appears from the following lines by the famous American poet:
“Hold your tongues! both
Swabian and Saxon,
A bold Bohemian cries;
If there’s a heaven upon this earth,
In Bohemia it lies.”
Overnight the Great War has changed many a wrong notion. “Time changes all, and by time is truth to victory guided; what in their errors the years planned, in a day is o’erthrown,” prophetically sings John Kollár, the great Slovak poet. Following the example of the French, several English and American writers, Henry Wickham Steed, R. W. Seton-Watson and Will S. Monroe among them, have in recent years paid visits to Bohemia, and the result is both surprising and gratifying. It is certain that, once aroused, Anglo-Saxon curiosity will not abate until it has learned all about Bohemia, even though the knowledge obtained may disagree with the Alice in Wonderland tales that have been related in Vienna to the old time British and American travelers.
A new development in the study of Bohemia and her people by foreigners may be said to date from the time the dual system of government was introduced (1867). Until then the interest of scholars was confined wholly to historic and sectarian questions; from that time on, political and ethnological issues began to engage their serious attention.
The present bibliography lists, besides books and pamphlets, magazine articles only; it does not pretend to register items appearing in the weekly, much less in the daily press. To attempt the latter would be beyond the scope and purpose of the catalogue. Exceptions to the rule have been made in favor of articles bearing the signature of authors who are known to be especially qualified to discuss the subjects selected by them.
Scarcely a book has been written on Austria or the Slavs which does not, directly or indirectly, discuss Bohemia and the Čechs. The catalogue cannot take cognizance of such publications, although, in this respect also, the rule has been relaxed and books have been indexed, dealing broadly with Austria and the Slavs. Colquhoun’s The Whirlpool of Europe: Austria-Hungary and the Hapsburgs, Steed’s The Hapsburg Monarchy and Seton-Watson’s German, Slav, and Magyar may be cited as typical examples of these publications.
Quite correctly the spelling of proper names, though obsolescent, has been left undisturbed. The Bohemians spell Hus, not Huss; Žižka, not Zisca. Comenius is a Latinized form dating back to an age when it was the custom to Latinize one’s surname; the real name is Komenský and Bohemian history knows the educator by this name only.
The authors have availed themselves of the skilled services of Leonard C. Wharton, who was asked to look into the rare Bohemica preserved in the British Museum. Mr. Wharton performed this part of the work with painstaking care.
Many of the seventeenth century items have been extracted from the British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books. The Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum has yielded The Historie of Bohemia, written presumably in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Items of minor value were obtained from the State Papers of John Thurloe; the Harleian Miscellany, or a collection of scarce, curious and entertaining Pamphlets and Tracts; Robert Watts’ Bibliotheca Britannica, or a General Index to British and Foreign Literature. For numerous current items the authors are indebted to Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature and the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature.
The reader will probably agree with the present authors that but for Bohemia’s Protestant past, Anglo-American Bohemica would be practically non-existent. Strip the source book of Hus, of the events which followed the Reformation and the anti-Reformation, of the United Brethren and their alleged offspring, the Moravians, of Komenský, and Bohemia would stand before the Anglo-American world like Cinderella from the fairy tale—unwritten about, still waiting to be discovered.
The bibliography proper is subdivided into twenty-two parts, a brief and relevant comment accompanying each part. The respective sub-titles are: Art, Bibliography, Biography, Bohemian Glass, Dictionaries, Drama, Fiction, Folk and Fairy Tales, Guides, History, John Hus, John Amos Komenský, Language and Literature, Miscellany, Music, Periodicals, Plans and Maps, Politics, Prague, Sociology and Economics, Sokols, Travel and Description. A separate chapter, entitled Bohemia in the British State Papers and Manuscripts, contains bibliographical extracts from the Calendar of State Papers, the Reports of the British Historical Manuscripts Commission, the Reports of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Papal Registers, etc.
The especial acknowledgments of the authors are due to Prof. Will S. Monroe, author of Bohemia and the Čechs, and to Mr. Leonard C. Wharton of London. Prof. Monroe kindly read and compared with his own, the bibliography on Komenský. The material which Mr. Wharton has sent from England emphasizes anew the enthusiastic interest he takes in the language, history and literature of the Bohemian people.
Art. Reference is made in this biographical manual to the work of three artists. The first is Václav Holar of Prácheň, or Wenceslaus Hollar, as his name was spelled in England. A Protestant exile, whom the edicts of anti-reformation had driven from his home, Hollar drifted to England, where he gained the reputation as the foremost etcher of his time. His plates, which number about 2,400 pieces, are highly prized by art collectors. “He drew plans, prospects and portraits; habits and dresses; churches, monuments and antiquaries, or etched designs by famous Italian, German, Dutch and English masters, some done from the collection of King Charles I. and especially from those belonging to Thomas Earl of Arundel, who brought Hollar to and supported him in England.” (Vertue). Born in 1607 in Prague, he was buried in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, 28th of March, 1677. He showed the lasting attachment to his fatherland by signing many of his works “Wenceslaus Hollar Bohemus.”
Anne of Bohemia (1366-1394)
Daughter of Charles IV., wife of Richard II. of England
Václav Brožík (1851-1901) was a noted painter of historic subjects. His greatest picture is “Master John Hus condemned to death by the Council of Constance,” now the property of the municipality of Prague. American art lovers will remember Brožík’s “Defenestration, or thrown from the window at Prague,” exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art owns a large canvas by him, “Columbus at the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella.” The Lenox Library (now the New York Public Library) has “Rudolph II. in the Laboratory of his Alchymist,” and “The Grandmother’s Namesday.” “As a historical painter, Brožík equals the greatest by his breadth of conception, fine composition, strength of work and dramatic effect.” This is the estimate of the painter by Mr. Larroument, Secretary of the French Académie des Beaux Arts. For his art galleries in New York and Philadelphia, John Wanamaker purchased several of the artist’s smaller themes, and from his executors the entire contents of his Paris studio, studies, sketches, antiques, draperies and hangings.
Alfons M. Mucha, born in 1860 in Moravia, earned his spurs in Paris as a poster artist. He is not unknown in the United States, having visited this country on two or three occasions, working here as portraitist, illustrator and interior decorator. For several years he has been engaged on a series of allegories intended to portray the historical development of the Slavs. When finished, the canvases are to be presented to the City of Prague as the gift of the well-known Slavophile, Charles R. Crane of Chicago and New York.
Bibliography. So far as the writers know, no one has before this concerned himself with a systematic compilation of a bibliography of this kind. The late Herman Rosenthal, Director of the Slavonic Department of the New York Public Library, is said to have been at work on a Slavic bibliography; but his literary executors have not yet published it. Dr. A. Sum, member of the English Club in Prague, has taken more than a passing interest in English Bohemica. The late Jeffrey D. Hrbek, an exceptionally gifted young man (see his biography published posthumously), prepared for the Osvěta Americká (1908) what was then considered to be a fairly exhaustive bibliography. The list mentions ninety volumes, many of them containing but remote and irrelevant allusions to Bohemia. The bibliography appended to Miss Balch’s Our Slavic Fellow Citizens is quite considerable; however, this work treats not of Bohemians alone, but of all the Slavs, and, when the process of elimination is applied, it will be seen that the purely Bohemian share of reference books is small. Then there is Leonard C. Wharton’s list, printed in the Guide to the Kingdom of Bohemia; this takes notice of thirty-five items. As regards the Hus and the Moravian Church literatures, Wm. Gunn Malin’s catalogue is, without doubt, the richest and the most valuable of all.
Biography. Biographical material in the several encyclopædias is meagre and perfunctory and what there is of it has been chiefly extracted from German lexicons. Count Lützow edited items on Bohemia for the Encyclopædia Britannica. J. J. Král has written for Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia short biographical sketches of several authors—Jungmann, Kollár, Němcová, Neruda and the Jirečeks among them. The Biographical Dictionary of the Library of the World’s Best Literature contains the lives of some two dozen men of letters. Injudiciously the editor of the Biographical Dictionary has included among Bohemian (Čech) writers Charles Sealsfield (pseudonym of Karl Anton Postl, by some written Postel) and Fritz Mauthner. While it is true that the first named was born in Moravia and the other in Bohemia, both Sealsfield and Mauthner were, as a matter of fact, Germans.
P. Selver in his Anthology of Modern Bohemian Poetry gives, besides specimens of their verse, an illuminating account of the lives of a number of poets. The biographies of the literary workers of old Bohemia are treated adequately in Lützow’s History of Bohemian Literature.
No Čech has been more written about than Hus; and, incidentally, none has shed greater lustre on his native land than he. Every volume dealing with the causes and effects of the Reformation necessarily considers Hus’s part therein. Associated with Hus usually appears the name of his fellow-martyr, Jerome of Prague.
Biographies of Komenský are not wanting, for which thanks are due principally to educators the world over, who regard Komenský’s writings as milestones in the progress of education.
Music, speaking as it does a language which is universally understood, has granted a passport to Anton Dvořák and in a lesser degree to Bedřich Smetana and Zděnek Fibich.
The interested public will find many portraits and life sketches in Vicker’s, Gregor’s, Maurice’s and Monroe’s volumes. Some have been published in The Bohemian Voice; however, complete files of this magazine are now exceedingly rare.
Bohemian Glass is renowned everywhere for its excellence and beauty. The industry is an old one and there are some two thousand shops and factories in the country engaged in the making of it. As an export article Bohemian glass constitutes a major item.
Dictionaries. Grammars. Interpreters. Adolf William Straka, (died in London in 1872), a political exile, who lived for years in England, becoming a British subject, was the first to write an English Bohemian Grammar. It was printed in Prague in 1862.
The first English Bohemian dictionary, by Charles Jonáš, was published in Racine, Wisconsin. Before emigrating to the United States in 1863, Jonáš spent some time in London. In the English metropolis he associated with Straka and the inference is that the author of the English Bohemian Grammar inspired a liking for lexicographical work in his younger fellow-exile.
Charles Jonáš, the “first Bohemian in America” was born in 1840 and died abroad in 1896 while serving the United States in the capacity of Consul. He was buried in Prague, “in the land he loved above all else.” Although he was not a philologist by training, having studied in a technological institute, he plunged courageously into lexicography. His introductory work was the Bohemian English Interpreter (1865), followed by the Dictionary of the English and Bohemian Languages (1876). Like every initial effort, the dictionary was deficient in many respects. Each succeeding edition, however, was improved and amplified, so that now Jonáš’ dictionaries compare favorably with like German publications. Other American Bohemians have achieved political distinction in the United States (Jonáš was successively State Senator, Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin and U. S. Consul at Prague), yet Jonáš the journalist, Jonáš the author, Jonáš the politician had not, in the estimation of pioneer immigrants, an equal among his American co-nationals.
F. B. Zdrůbek’s Anglická mluvnice (1870) is the earliest publication of its kind in America. Crude typographically and faulty textually, the volume is a compliment neither to the printer nor to the author. Jonáš and Zdrůbek, one will observe, worked along parallel lines. This is explained by the circumstance that the two men were attached to two rival newspaper and printing concerns—Jonáš to the weekly Slavie published in Racine, and Zdrůbek to the daily Svornost of Chicago.
F. B. Zdrůbek, for over thirty years editor of the Chicago Svornost, and one of the leaders of the Bohemian rationalists in the United States, was born in 1842 and died in Chicago in 1911. He took a course first in a Catholic, then in a Protestant theological seminary. Convinced that “as a minister of the gospel he could not make an honorable living unless he chose to make of his vocation a vulgar traffic and practiced from the pulpit pious extortion,” as he wrote in his autobiography, he gave up the ministry and devoted himself to journalism. Most prolific of all the American Bohemian men of letters, Zdrůbek was in fact not a creative writer but a translator. As a journalist he was distinctly commonplace.
Jaroslav J. Zmrhal, teacher in a Chicago school, has given the public in his Anglicky snadno ve třiceti úlohách, one of the best hand-books for the learning of the English language thus far compiled. Zmrhal’s method of pronunciation is clearly an improvement over all previous books; certainly it is superior to Zdrůbek’s, who after all, possessed but a book knowledge of English.
Last, but not least, is a comprehensive Učebnice by F. Francl of New York. Altogether it may be stated that grammars and interpreters by American Bohemians who know alike the vocabulary and the spirit of the English tongue, are more serviceable, if not wholly superior to most of the “English Easy and Quick” hand-books which have been published in Prague.
The most versatile linguist in Bohemia was Francis Vymazal (1841-1917), who compiled a lengthy row of manuals of the “English at a glance” type. Vymazal’s series includes the study of English, Bulgarian, Russian, French, Hebrew, Dutch, Latin, Magyar, German, Gypsy, Modern Greek, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Old Greek, Spanish, Turkish and Italian. Owing to his manner of life and dress—he was not afraid to lead the life of a lowly proletarian—the people of Brno, in which city he lived and died, nicknamed him “Bohemian Diogenes.”
Drama. That the Poles and the Bohemians, two submerged nations, have each given to the American stage a tragic actress—the Poles Helena Modjeska, the Bohemians Frances Janauschek—may and may not be accidental. Many people have supposed Janauschek to be a German tragedienne, because in the early years of her career, before she mastered the English language, she played in German, on the German stage. But she was of pure Bohemian stock, born in Prague in 1830. By virtue of her long residence in America and her devotion to and life-long association with the American stage, she was really an American actress.
Fiction. Translations from fiction are disappointingly few. Of course, this is no evidence that Bohemia has no fiction writers; the truth is that she has not found Isabella Hapgoods and Jeremiah Curtins to translate what she has. With one notable exception, Božena Němcová’s Babička, nothing worth note has been rendered into English from the prose. The story Maria Felicia by Karolina Světlá, which an American Bohemian woman has translated into English, is no more typical of Bohemia than it is of Finland, Spain or any other country. One should not only know how to translate, but, what is just as essential, what to translate. A. V. Šmilovský, whose story, Nebesa, the Moureks translated, is a meritorious writer, but by no means of the high type of Alois Jirásek or Julius Zeyer.
Several foreign writers of fiction have made use of a Bohemian theme more or less successfully, the earliest of them being George Sand. Unfortunately Sand’s Bohemians in Consuelo and in its sequel The Countess of Rudolstadt, are about as real as Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday.
Folk and Fairy Tales. Karel Jaromír Erben (1811-1870), whose folk tales Rev. Wratislaw translated into English, is recognized as an authority on folk lore. “If Erben had left nothing else but his Nosegay of National Folk Tales, his name would always rank among Bohemian writers of the first magnitude,” says a critic. Most of the writers of folk tales here listed have borrowed from Erben.
The Guide to the Kingdom of Bohemia, published in Prague in 1906, is primarily intended to attract travelers to the ancient capital of the country; however, the information it contains is of interest alike to travelers and to non-travelers.
History. Probably the first instance in which the English and the Bohemians came into contact with each other, although as foes on the field of battle, occurred in 1346 at the battle of Crécy. Here fell, fighting on the side of the French, against the English, John of Luxemburg, the blind King of Bohemia. King John’s crest was three ostrich feathers and his motto “I serve”; which the Prince of Wales and his successors adopted in memorial of this great victory of the English.
A more agreeable event in the relationship of England and Bohemia took place thirty-six years later (1382), when Richard II. engaged himself to Anne of Luxemburg, the granddaughter of the very ruler whom the English had fought at Crécy. The popular though erroneous belief is that through Queen Anne the writings of Wicliffe were introduced into Bohemia. In her readable Lives of the Queens of England, Agnes Strickland devotes a few warmly written pages to “Anne of Bohemia, surnamed the Good, first Queen of Richard II.”
The gallant knight, Sir Simon Burley, the English ambassador, was charged with bringing Richard’s bride from Prague to London. “England was to Bohemia a sort of terra incognita; and as a general knowledge of geography and statistics was certainly not among the list of imperial accomplishments in the fourteenth century, the empress (Anne’s mother) despatched duke Primislaus of Saxony on a voyage of discovery, to ascertain, for the satisfaction of herself and the princess what sort of country England might be.”[2]
England may have seemed an out of the way land to the Bohemians of old, yet the English people were by no means unknown to them. The fondness of the Bohemians for travel in foreign countries was well known.[3] That entertaining compilation of wonder-stories comprised in Sir John Mandeville’s Travels was translated at an early date into the national language. Students from Bohemia were wont to go to the universities at Oxford and Paris in order to broaden their education. Jerome of Prague is known to have studied at Oxford. Like others of his countrymen he had been drawn thither by the fame of Wicliff’s name.
Most readers will be surprised to learn that a Bohemian had been one of the torchbearers of Reformation in Scotland. The name of this minor reformer is Paul of Kravař or Crawar, as Scotch writers spell the name. According to Burton[4] “Crawar was a German, believed to have come from Bohemia to propose the doctrines that had been preached by John Hus and Jerome of Prague. All that we are told of him personally is that he professed to be a physician, and to be traveling and visiting in the practice of his calling.” Kravař was burned at St. Andrews, July 23, 1433, as a heretic Hussite. “The churchman who records his burning,” relates Burton, “takes occasion to enlarge on the characteristics of Taborites and other Bohemian heretics.” Lang[5] states that “he was an envoy of the Hussite ‘miscreants.’ Lawrence of Lindores attacked him, but he found him well read in scriptures.”
