Author: Jiří Kudrnáč
Masaryk university, Brno
Translation from Czech by Zhorzheta Cholakova
Published in: Slavyanski dialozi, VII, 2010, 10-11
Abstract: The author traces the contribution of two leading poets from the Roman Catholic Modernistic School to Czech poetry. Both poets, together with the other fin-de-siècle writers, created landscape and meditative lyrics. As early as the late 1880’s, Xaver Dvořák, the older of the two, was a pioneer of the above-mentioned synthesis of Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism, while Sigismund Bouška joined this stream several years later. In the 1890’s, their writings nearly approached the best Modernistic poetry of that time (Otokar Březina, Antonín Sova, Karel Hlaváček and Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic). After 1900, however, their works displayed strong tendencies towards Parnassianism and Realism. Rare progressive elements, such as the experiments with free verse and symbolic prose, appeared in their later work but they did not, in part rightly, find a considerable response