Linkages Among Different Cultural History

He cites the resonance of "Bohemia" as an exotic place name but acknowledges that Czech floor "has no clear trajectory, and . . . lacks an unambiguous and unified subject" (CB 15). That owes something to geography, since the area has historically been a "crossroads" of conflict between other, much politically powerful states.

The crossroads dynamic is tellingly envisioned in the 1966 contract Closely Observed Trains, set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, which work throughd postwar Soviet occupation. The personal sexual quandary of Milos is a metaphor for Czechoslovakia's impotent war behavior, and the World struggle II Nazis are a metaphor for the Cold war Communists--as if the filmmaker is satirically noting that the Czechs, for all their cultural pretensions, were no bear upon for committed political juggernauts, fascist or communist. As comments, the film shows "interplay between history at a personal take aim with the larger historical framework" (COT 3).

Even so, Sayer asserts that the Czech individualism has found expression in art. It is the source of the famous 10th-century allegory of Good King Wenceslas, of the ill-fated religious reforler Jan Hus, and of the early twentieth century playwright Karel Capek. It has figured so prominently in art history (especially since the success of Puccini's opera La BohFme in 1896) that the international lexicon back-formed a neologism: To be a Bohemian is to be an artist (or anyway would-be artist) with a unadorned identity who lives ra

Thompson, Leonard. A storey of South Africa. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Kundera, Milan. The Book of gag and Forgetting. Trans. Aaron Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 1996.

The disconnect of emotional experience on a personal level can be likened to the truncation of geopolitical Czech experience.

The country may find its way; the bulk who remained there to watch events unfold as well as those who left for the West may not recover their identities, a situation amplified by the fact that Czech political experience has historically unfolded on the boundaries of non-Czech political entities. Kundera's employment of discontinuous accomplish has been likened to narrative structure as a species of musical variations in a single piece (DF 30). Discontinuous action and gloomy diction can also be interpreted as something of a Czech, or perhaps Slavic, tradition that Kundera valorizes. In an screen on what he sees as unsatisfactory translations of Kafka that rob Kafka's texts of their Czech identity, Kundera cites "the specific beauty" of Kafka's art, such as his use of " existential or phenomenological" [= philosophical] metaphor (TB 106), which, in Kafka's lifetime, seem to have been airplane pilot with him (Sartre was born a generation later). Lamenting the aesthetic subversiveness of the great artist, Kundera takes French translators and German typographers especially to task for "the gloominess of the posthumous fate of Kafka's work" (TB 119).

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