The Coasts of Bohemia
A Czech History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3244532 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert Legvold |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 77 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 161 |
| Publication date | 1998-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, Derek Sayer, 1998 |
| Venue | Foreign Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0015-7120 • E-ISSN: 2327-7793 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/20049097 |
| OpenAlex | W2068499336 |
| Language | EN |
In 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 in the margins of other people's stories. In this book, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a history of the Czech people that is also a history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy centre. Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theatre of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavonic 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. It draws on 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 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
Ancient history · Archaeology · Czech · Economic history · Geography · Linguistics · Political science · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Philosophy
Redrawing the imagined map of Europe
Martyrs and Neighbors
The Deep Time of the Dead
Scholars in Exile
The Habsburg Monarchy 1815–1918
Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good
Symbols of Defeat in the Construction of National Identity
Constructing Czechoslovakia
New States, Old Identities? The Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Historical Understandings of Statehood
Print Capitalism or Patronage, Propaganda, and Policing
Highly Civilized, yet Very Simple’
Between Balkanization and Banalization
An international politics of Czech architecture; or, reviving the international in international political sociology
Czech Society in-between the Waves
And 1968, 1939 and 1969, and the Philosophy of Czech History from Karel H. Mácha to Jan Patočka
Zap's Prague
Tunneling Towards Capitalism in the Czech Republic
Prague-Vienna, Prague-Berlin
High Modernism in Theory and Practice
From nation to population
Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture
| Highly cited | No |
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