Czech literature

The literature of Czechoslovakia and the Czech republic. Czech writing first flourished in the 14th century but was effectively suppressed by the Habsburg dynasty. The tradition revived in the 19th century and grew steadily until World War I. After the establishment of the independent state of Czechoslovakia in 1918, literature flourished until the communist takeover of 1948. In the 1960s, writers such as Milan Kundera and Miroslav Holub again gained attention both in Czechoslovakia and abroad. Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) was made into an internationally successful film in 1988.

In its early years, Czech literature was heavily associated with Hussite Protestantism and the early Renaissance. Hence, the emergence of the Catholic Habsburgs effectively drove the indigenous literary tradition into exile, where the polymath Ámos Komenský (Comenius) (1592-1670) wrote his prose masterpiece Labyrint světa a ráj srdce/Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart 1631. The romantic poetry of Karel Hynek Mácha and the Máj group he inspired, which included the poet Vitězslaw Hálek (1835-1874), had a great impact in the 19th century. Czech literature flourished between the world wars with the plays of Karel Čapek and František Langer (1888-1965), the poetry of Jaroslav Seifert, and the later fiction of Jaroslav Hašek. After a brief stagnation in the early communist period, literature began to re-emerge in Czechoslovakia from the 1960s onward. From the 1970s until the fall of communism, writers played a prominent part in the democratic dissident movement, and the playwright Václav Havel (1936- ) became the country's first post-communist president 1989.