Czechoslovakian Literature

Abstract

The modern Republic of Czechoslovakia came into being in autumn 1918. However, a vigorous literature was already extant in Czech and, to a lesser extent, in Slovak. Literary Czech was fully developed in 1348, when Prague University was founded; the nineteenth-century patriots had the rich tradition of the earliest great Slavonic literature to draw upon. Czech and Slovak are similar (the Czecho-Moravian dialect is actually a transition between the two languages, with a largely similar vocabulary). The Czechs have dominated the modern period (with the exception of the immediate post-1945 period), but there have been a few important Slovak writers. The only two writers to have achieved a truly international reputation are Hašek and Čapek (qq.v.).