The Way There and Back Again: Kolár's Short Story Libuše in America and the Orientation of Its Values
Abstract
This study aims to give a new perspective on Josef Jiří Kolár's short story Libuše in America (1854), long considered by critics and literary historians as a kind of popular adventure story without ideological or aesthetic ambitions. The study first examines Kolár's prose in the context of a contemporary domestic historical short story that takes liberties with its historical source material.
In Libuše in America, however, such liberties are exaggerated to the point of founding an alternate parallel history in opposition to the tragic nature of actual historical events. The next part of the study uses specific examples to show how the effect of this discrepancy between the fantasy and the real world is intensified by the original use of compositional, lexical, grammatical and poetic means.
The final section shows the mutual reflection of an idealized Czech society in America and the real situation in Bohemia as a manifestation of romantic irony and product of the author's bitter reflections on the decline of the Czech world.