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The title of the following essay was inspired by the first English written monograph about the personality of Milan Kundera which has the same subtitle “A Voice from Central Europe”. ?1? Critical vision of Europe in the second half of the last century in Kundera’s novels and essays is generally known. Ivan Wernisch (born 1942) is internationally less famous than Kundera, because he did not emigrate after the Soviet invasion to Czechoslovakia in 1968, he published mostly in samizdat and began to be highly app...

Petr Hruska (born 1964) is a poet and literary historian from Ostrava. This post-industrial city used to be famous for its black coal mines and steel factories. At the time of the industrial boom, Ostrava started to be a “melting pot” of nations living in this part of Central Europe – the Czechs, Poles, Germans from Silesia, Austrians, Jews, and Slovaks. No wonder, then, that the cultural life of this region differs from that in traditional centres of Czech culture like Prague or Brno. Nevertheless, HruskaвЂ...

The contemporary Czech poet using the pseudonym Ewald Murrer (born in 1964 in Prague) used to be a representative of Czech underground literature before 1989. Then he became one of the most specific and original artists of his generation. The present essay deals with his very successful collection of poetry called The Diary of Mr. Pinke (1991, English translation published in 2022). Between the world wars, the most Eastern part of Czechoslovakia was so-called Subcarpathian Ruthenia (or Karpatenukraine in German). ...

Pavel Srut (1940-2018) was a representative of a young generation of poets in the golden 1960s. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops (1968), he stayed in Czechoslovakia but could only publish in samizdat and exile. During the period of strict neo-Stalinist censorship (1969-1989), Srut continued to write, more for himself and for a vaguely anticipated future readership. He followed the tradition of the Central European absurdity, which we know from the work of Franz Kafka. One of the highlights of Srut’s ...

According to available information, it is still true that the most translated Czech novel is The Good Soldier Schweik (1921-23) by Jaroslav Hasek. By 2013, it had been translated into 58 languages. Schweik’s journey to the world began with translations into German, initially continuing mainly in the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and further in Russia and Ukraine. This artistic vision of war absurdities became widely known, especially after WWII and inspired such famous antimilitary works like C...