But upon the fourth day about ten of the clocke, the wind began to cease, the sea to waxe calme, and the sky to be cleare, and the Mariners descryed the coast of Bohemia, shooting of their ordnance for joy that they had escaped such a fearefull tempest.
—Robert Greene, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588)
The theme of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair—“Czechia: A Country on the Coast”—draws from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, which situates Bohemia on a stormy seacoast, as did Shakespeare’s principal source, Robert Greene’s Pandosto. The Czech guests of honor at the Book Fair have fully owned that slip by the Bard, choosing to see it as “a timeless metaphor,” identifying landlocked Czechia/Bohemia “as an integral part of the world’s ocean of literature.” It also bespeaks an openness to whimsical counterfactual worlds—something I’ll return to.
But a less charitable interpretation is also possible. For Shakespeare, as for many others, Bohemia was a blank slate. The Great Unknown, a free-floating signifier with vaguely romantic—bohemian—associations. Derek Sayer chose this interpretation when he titled his 1998 Czech history The Coasts of Bohemia. Summarizing the image of Czechia in the Western imagination, Sayer writes, “not only has it been pastoralized, as with Shakespeare, and romanticized, as by Puccini, Apollinaire, and countless others. It has also been Orientalized, translated to that timeless East where they have plentiful mysteries and abundant antiquities and altogether lack histories.” Too often, such varying interpretations have been possible because they are pinned to what Neville Chamberlain called “a faraway country” with people “of whom we know nothing.”
As Layman Publishing sends two representatives to this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, we have reflected on what readers know of actual Czech life, as opposed to the Bohemian life of foreign writers’ fantasies. This landlocked country in the very heart of Europe has long punched well above its weight in the influence of its own writers, and it is thanks in large part to these authors that readers worldwide have mental images associated with Czechia: Franz Kafka’s K. standing on a wooden bridge and surveying a village deep in snow at the opening of The Castle; the power of the seemingly frail young Tereza as she photographs Soviet tanks in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; the church bells, faces, rain-wet roofs, and glimpses of the Castle found in Jaroslav Seifert’s poetry—poems “endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness” according to the Nobel committee’s 1984 citation, providing “a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man.”
From the 1960s though the 1990s, writers like Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Klíma, Václav Havel, and Josef Škvorecký gained global prominence, with books published in multiple world languages by major commercial publishers and reviewed in The New York Times and TLS. In playful, searching, and imaginative works, they gave a broader readership a rich picture of contemporary Czech life, from the banal absurdities of communism to the humor, characteristic atmosphere, and eroticism of private life. These authors—many of them dissidents, exiles, and targets of censorship—benefited from but were also constrained by the fact that, like writers across the Slavic world for generations, they were expected to be not only writers but truth-tellers and philosophers. “Politicians in spite of themselves,” as a 1989 cover article by Škvorecký in the NYT Book Review called them, their outsized public role sometimes meant that the depth and ambiguities of their books were flattened into a single “message” or roadmap for action.
Credit: © Jan Moch, shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
We can find one way, anyway, that Czech writers’ visions coincide with the fantasies of Shakespeare and others: these writers often take full advantage of the explosion of possibilities made possible by moving beyond the purely realistic and representational. Contemporary Czech writer Michal Ajvaz begins his novel The Golden Age (2001) with an epigraph from Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, expressing Meinong’s core insight that we can think about infinitely more things than exist in reality. In expressing alternate ways of seeing, dreams, and possibilities in ways that can resemble magical realism, these writers have not only given a worldwide audience an understanding of Czech life. They have also helped us all see our own lives and the world around us anew.
The Golden Age is typical of Ajvaz, who, in the words of Jan Tlusty, “creates alternative possible worlds that are based on unconventional modes of perception; almost all of his poetry and fiction is set in a fantastic, dreamlike version of his home city, Prague.” Ajvaz’s narrator, now ensconced in his Prague apartment, describes the three years he spent on an Atlantic island whose inhabitants’ perception of the world is an explicit counter to anyone who wants to reduce ambiguities and focus on “meaning” and “message”:
On the island meaningfulness was taken to be something base, almost indecent, and the islanders saw a great many shades of pleasure in the meaningless. So while others use words to build complex structures of meaning, I wish to devote myself to the joyful histories in which the maze of the island’s life, which is without order and has no centre, is first transformed into the still more fantastic ruins of memory reminiscent of the sleeping Leviathan before it is overgrown with the jungle of language so completely that it disappears into it. I must admit that I am also driven to write by regret, by nostalgia, and the silent hope that as the sentences meander the smells of the island—from which once I had allowed one ship after another to leave without me—will waft in my direction, at least for a while. For the very reason that words do not always attend to our wishes, coming to us uninvited, serving to confuse us, out of landscapes unknown, for a moment their light can shine on lost treasures, treasures hidden from the memory.
As Tlustý notes, Ajvaz’s meandering narrative calls to mind the experimental novels of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Julio Cortázar (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 353).
Ajvaz is very much active on the literary scene today—and attended last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair—but he is now part of the old guard. A new generation of writers includes many exciting voices. A few of these include
- Kateřina Tučková, whose Gerta (2009) explores the expulsion of Germans from Brno after World War II. Her The Last Goddess (2012) draws on folklore and the ancient healing practices of women in villages in the White Carpathian mountains.
- In Petra Hůlová’s Three Plastic Rooms (2006), a Prague sex worker approaches the absurdities of sex and capitalism. Hůlová’s The Long Version (2023) is an intergenerational story of sex and power, as a daughter sees her mother’s past in a new light in the post-#MeToo era.
- Marek Torčík debuted as a poet but attracted literary prizes and international attention for Memory Burn (2023), the coming-of-age story of a young gay man in a conservative and impoverished industrial town.
- In Lucie Faulerová’s Dust Catchers (2017) a young woman lives alone, surrounded by dusty knick-knacks, and shares her self-talk, inner demons, and traumatic past. Deathmaiden (2020) won the European Union Prize for Literature and offers a psychological journey through grief and memory—what one Czech review called a “a sort of road movie of the mind.”
All of these writers came of age after the 1989 Velvet Revolution and the “Velvet Divorce” between Czechia and Slovakia in 1992. And all are among the seventy-five Czech writers selected to attend the 2026 Frankfurt Book Fair. The books by Tučková and Hůlová mentioned above are readily available in English translation; Torčík’s and Faulerová’s exist in German, Spanish, and other languages but not yet in English. Not sure where to start on Czech literature? Check out Jaroslav Kalfar’s “Read Your Way Through Prague.”
Ajvaz, Michal. The Golden Age: A Novel. Translated by Andrew Oakland, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010.
Greene, Robert. Pandosto: The Triumph of Time. London, Thomas Cadman, 1588.
Podskalská, Jana. “Smrtholka. Dívčí dialog ve stínu smrti stojí za pozornost” [Deathmaiden. A Girl’s Dialogue in the Shadow of Death Worth Noting]. Deník.cz. 9 June 2020.
Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton UP, 1998.
Tlustý, Jan. “Michal Ajvaz (30 October 1949– ).” Twenty-First-Century Central and Eastern European Writers, edited by Steven Serafin and Vasa D. Mihailovich, vol. 353, Gale, 2010, pp. 7-12. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 353.