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The story of Czech theatre in the twentieth century involves generations of mesmerizing players and memorable productions. Beyond these artistic considerations, however, lies a larger story: a theatre that has resonated with the intense concerns of its audiences acquires a significance and a force beyond anything created by striking individual talents or random stage hits. Amid the variety of performances during the past hundred years, that basic and provocative reality has been repeatedly demonstrated, as Jarka Burian reveals in his extraordinary history of the dramatic world of Czech theatre. Following a brief historical background, Burian provides a chronological series of perspectives and observations on the evolving nature of Czech theatre productions during this century in relation to their similarly evolving social and political contexts. Once Czechoslovak independence was achieved in 1918, a repeated interplay of theatre with political realities became the norm, sometimes stifling the creative urge but often producing even greater artistry. When playwright Václav Havel became president in 1990, this was but the latest and most celebrated example of the vital engagement between stage and society that has been a repeated condition of Czech theatre for the past two hundred years. In Jarka Burian's skillful hands, Modern Czech Theatre becomes an extremely important touchstone for understanding the history of modern theatre within western culture.
Catalog published to coincide with an exhibition held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 6, 2011-February 5, 2012.
A poignant reflection on alienation and belonging, told through the lives of five remarkable people who struggled against nationalism and intolerance in one of EuropeÕs most stunning cities. What does it mean to belong somewhere? For many of PragueÕs inhabitants, belonging has been linked to the nation, embodied in the capital city. Grandiose medieval buildings and monuments to national heroes boast of a glorious, shared history. Past governments, democratic and Communist, layered the city with architecture that melded politics and nationhood. Not all inhabitants, however, felt included in these efforts to nurture national belonging. Socialists, dissidents, Jews, Germans, and VietnameseÑall have been subject to hatred and political persecution in the city they called home. Chad Bryant tells the stories of five marginalized individuals who, over the last two centuries, forged their own notions of belonging in one of EuropeÕs great cities. An aspiring guidebook writer, a German-speaking newspaperman, a Bolshevik carpenter, an actress of mixed heritage who came of age during the Communist terror, and a Czech-speaking Vietnamese blogger: none of them is famous, but their lives are revealing. They speak to tensions between exclusionary nationalism and on-the-ground diversity. In their struggles against alienation and dislocation, they forged alternative communities in cafes, workplaces, and online. While strolling park paths, joining political marches, or writing about their lives, these outsiders came to embody a city that, on its surface, was built for others. A powerful and creative meditation on place and nation, the individual and community, Prague envisions how cohesion and difference might coexist as it acknowledges a need common to all.
Presentations of National Cultures. Fifty-one texts illustrate the evolution of modernism in the east-European region. Essays, articles, poems, or excerpts from longer works offer new opportunities of possible comparisons of the respective national cultures, from the different ideological approaches and finessing projects of how to create the modern state liberal, conservative, socialist and others to the literary and scientific attempts at squaring the circle of individual and collective identities.
With the emergence of a dissident playwright as the President of Czechoslovakia in 1989, the Czech tradition by which theatre mirrors political life came full circle. Ranging back over the three decades preceding the Velvet Revolution, these four plays show modern Czech writers skilfully commenting on current realities through historical and domestic themes. Published here for the first time in English, Vaclav Havel's Tomorrow!, written anonymously in 1988, is a historical comedy about the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic. Games by novelist Ivan Klima shows a house party going badly wrong as old guilts break the surface. In Joseph Topol's Cat on the Rails two lovers wait for a train that never comes. And Dog and Wolf by the leading woman playwright Daniela Fischerova takes Francois Villon as exemplar of the clash between artist and society.
It’s 1979 in Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing restoration of repressive communism known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his last novel, and even longer since he wrote the 1968 manifesto, "Two Thousand Words,” which the Soviet Union used as one of the pretexts for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of a friend, Vaculík begins to keep a diary: "a book about things, people and events.” Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculík has written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction – an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, the secret police and leading figures of the Czech underground play major roles.
Photomontage was pioneered as a technique in central Europe in the 1910s, where it flourished as an art form through the end of World War II. While German artists such as John Heartfield, Max Ernst and Hannah Höch used the medium to respond to the atrocities of war, other areas of Europe were simultaneously experiencing a newfound political autonomy as the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. For these artists, namely Polish and Czech, photomontage manifested itself in a Surrealist approach to cut-and-paste imagery that emphasized its potential for visual poetry. Photo/Montage in Print traces the explosion of photomontage art in book cover design and illustrated magazines in the interwar period. Documenting the remarkable contributions of Czech artists in the creation of the visual language of modern print media, the publication includes some of the leading artists of the Czech avant garde such as Karel Teige, Jindrich Styrsky, Toyen, Ladislav Sutnar and Frantisek Muzika.
The phenomenon of national identities, always a key issue in the modern history of Bohemian Jewry, was particularly complex because of the marginal differences that existed between the available choices. Considerable overlap was evident in the programs of the various national movements and it was possible to change one's national identity or even to opt for more than one such identity without necessarily experiencing any far-reaching consequences in everyday life. Based on many hitherto unknown archival sources from the Czech Republic, Israel and Austria, the author's research reveals the inner dynamic of each of the national movements and maps out the three most important constructions of national identity within Bohemian Jewry - the German-Jewish, the Czech-Jewish and the Zionist. This book provides a needed framework for understanding the rich history of German- and Czech-Jewish politics and culture in Bohemia and is a notable contribution to the historiography of Bohemian, Czechoslovak and central European Jewry.