page_title: Czech literature
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Czech literature / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Jaroslav Seifert český básníkEnglish: Jaroslav Seifert Czech writer
context_page_description: Czech literature can refer to literature written in the Czech language, in the Czech Republic, or by Czech people.
  Most literature in the Czech Republic is now written in Czech, but historically, a considerable part of Czech literary output was written in other languages as well, including Latin and German.
context_section_description: The turn of the 20th century marked a profound shift in Czech literature — after nearly a century of work, literature finally freed itself from the confines of needing to educate and serve the nation and spread Czech culture, and became literature simply for the sake of art. The orientation toward France, Northern Europe, and Russia intensified, and new demands were laid on the cultural knowledge of authors and their audience.
  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).
  After their rebellious first decade, the new generation of poets (Toman, Neumann, Šrámek) turned toward nature and life in their work. This decade also marked the return of Catholic authors (Josef Florian, Jakub Deml, Jaroslav Durych, Josef Váchal) and the first entrance of the avant-garde into Czech literature, seeking to document the rapid changes in society and modernization. The first avantgarde style was neoclassicism, which soon gave way to cubism, futurism, and civilism (S. K. Neumann, the young brothers Čapek).
  World War I brought with it a wave of repression of the newly emergent Czech culture, and this meant a return to the past, to traditional Czech values and history: the Hussites and the Awakening. The war, however, also precipitated a crisis of values, of faith in progress, religion, and belief, which found outlet in expressionism (Ladislav Klíma, Jakub Deml, Richard Weiner), civilism (Čapek brothers) and visions of a universal brotherhood of mankind (Ivan Olbracht, Karel Matěj Čapek Chod, F. X. Šalda).
  The interwar period, coinciding with the First Republic, is one of the apogees of Czech literature — the new state brought with it a plurality of thinking, religion, and philosophy, leading to a great flowering of literature and culture. 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). An antiwar comedy novel The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek is the most translated novel of the Czech literature (58 languages as of 2013).
  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). A specifically Czech literary style, poetism, was developed by the group Devětsil (Vítězslav Nezval, Jaroslav Seifert, Konstantin Biebl, Karel Teige), which argued that poetry should pervade everyday life, that poetry is inseparable from daily life, that everyone is a poet. Prose of the interwar period distanced itself even more from the traditional, single perspective prose of the previous century, in favor of multiple perspectives, subjectivity, and fractured narratives. Utopian and fantastic literature came into the forefront (Jan Weiss, Karel Čapek, Eduard Bass, Jiří Haussmann), as well as the genres of documentary prose, which sought to paint as accurate a picture of the world as possible (Karel Čapek, Egon Erwin Kisch, Jiří Weil, Rudolf Těsnohlídek, Eduard Bas
caption: Jaroslav Seifert was the only Czech writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
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