In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline--a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered only in the margins of other people's stories. In The Coasts of Bohemia, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a comprehensive and long-needed history of the Czech people that is also a remarkably original history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy center.
Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theater of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe; and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored.
The Coasts of Bohemia draws on an enormous array of literary, musical, visual, and documentary sources ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into intimate contact with the ever changing details of daily life--the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps--that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech. Sayer's sustained concern with questions of identity, memory, and power place the book at the heart of contemporary intellectual debate. It is an extraordinary story, beautifully told.
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From Publishers Weekly:...Sayer doesn't fall into the many traps awaiting cultural histories: he weaves individuals into the larger story, doesn't give in to nationalistic boosterism and doesn't make the messy unnecessarily clean. In readable but never condescending prose, Sayer tries to balance the multiplicity of art forms (although the performing arts do take second place to literature and the visual arts) to show how the Czechs constructed their identity...Lively and intelligent, it will appeal to the legions of Americans visiting (or settling in) Prague, as well as to anyone who wants to know about the culture that nurtured Kafka, Smetana, Karel Capek, Alfons Mucha, Josef Skvorecky, Dvorak and others. (Starred review, April 1998).
From Novy Domov (Czech newspaper, Toronto):
Autor je cesky profesor sociologie na University of Alberta v Edmontonu. Na temer 450 strankach zajimave podava dulezite useky z historie ceskeho naroda--od sv. Vaclava po Bilou horu, tristaletou porobu, obrozeni a rozkvet ceskeho pisemnictvi 19. a 20. stoleti. Je to idealni zdroj pouceni o nasich dejinach pro Cechy i cechofily ctouci anglicky. Kniha se setkala s velice priznivym kritickym ohlasem. (Zdena Salivarova, 6. June 1998)
Translation: The author is a Czech professor of sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Over almost 450 pages he engagingly presents important junctures from the history of the Czech nation--from Saint Vaclav through the White Mountain, the three hundred years of subjugation, the [national] revival and the flowering of Czech literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is an ideal source of knowledge about our history for Czechs as well as for English-speaking Czechophiles. The book has met with a very favorable critical response.
Mockrat dekuji pani Salivarove za recenzi, a take za poklonu -- ale Cech rozhodne nejsem! Svoji cestinu si neustale zdokonaluji. Jsem Anglican, zijici v Kanade v poslednich letech. Mam ale ceskou manzelku, Alenu, ktera prelozila vsechno z cestiny v knize, a bez ktere bych nemohl takovou knihu napsat vubec.
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