Czech poetry

Czech literature is the literature written in the Czech language. The earliest literary works written in Czech date to the 15th century. Modern literature may be divided into the periods of national awakening in the 19th century; the avantgarde of the interwar period; the years under Communism and the Prague Spring; and the literature of the post-Communist Czech Republic.

In another meaning of the term,, "Czech literature" may refer to "literature written by Czechs" regardless of language, including works in Old Church Slavonic, Middle Latin or German.

Bohemia was Christianized in the late 9th to 10th centuries, and the earliest written works associated with the kingdom of Bohemia are Middle Latin works written in the 12th to 13th centuries (with the exception of the Latin Legend of Christian, supposedly of the 10th century but of dubious authenticity). The majority of works from this period are chronicles and hagiographies. Bohemian hagiographies focus exclusively on Bohemian saints (Sts. Ludmila, Wenceslas, Procopius, Cyril and Methodius, and Adalbert), although numerous legends about Bohemian saints were also written by foreign authors. The most important chronicle of the period is the Chronica Boemorum (Bohemian Chronicle) by Cosmas, though it does approach its topics with then-contemporary politics in mind, and attempts to legitimize the ruling dynasty. Cosmas' work was updated and extended by several authors in the latter part of the 12th and during the 13th centuries.

During the first part of the 13th century, the Přemyslid rulers of Bohemia expanded their political and economic influence westward and came into contact with the political and cultural kingdoms of Western Europe. This cultural exchange was evident in literature through the introduction of German courtly poetry, or Minnesang, in the latter part of the 13th century. After the murder of Wenceslas III and the subsequent upheavals in the kingdom in 1306, however, the Bohemian nobles distanced themselves from German culture and looked for literature in their native language. Despite this, German remained an important literary language in Bohemia until the 19th century. This new literature in Czech consisted largely of epic poetry of two types: the legend and the knightly epic, both based on apocryphal tales from the Bible, as well as hagiographic legends of earlier periods. Prose was also first developed during this period: administrative and instructional texts, which necessitated the development of a more extensive and specialized vocabulary; the first Czech-Latin dictionaries date from this time. Extensive chronicles, of which the Chronicle of Dalimil and Chronicon Aulae Regiae (the Zbraslav Chronicle) are the most striking examples, and artistic prose (e.g. Smil Flaška z Pardubic and Johannes von Saaz) were also written.

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