Cech, Svatopluk (1846–1908)

Czech poet and novelist. He was one of the principal architects of Czech nationalism. His verse is richly rhetorical and full of vivid images. Cech's varied work includes epics based on Czech history, idylls, and satirical and philosophical poems. His prose satires on Czech bourgeois mentality in The True Story of Mr Broucek's Excursion to the Moon and Mr Broucek's New Epoch-Making Excursion, This Time to the Fifteenth Century, both published in 1888, were later the subjects of operas by Leoš Janáček.

Cech also wrote political and social poems; his collection of verse Songs of a Slave (1894) is a broadside against the Austrian monarchy which ruled over the Czech people at that time.