Pavel Janoušek
Vladimír Macura. Birth of the national mythology as a theoreticla construct and a practical act
This paper focuses on Vladimír Macura, a literary theorist who played a primary role in ensuring that contemporary interpretations of Czech literature, culture and society during the first third of the 19th century do not lack the terms or expressions ‘mystification’ and ‘play’. The question arises to what extent is Macura's interpretation of the Czech National Revival as a specific cultural type the result of the characteristics of the material under review and to what extent it grows out of the researcher's natural disposition and his innate tendency towards mystifying games, which enabled him to view the period under review from another perspective differing from that of his predecessors. Mystification attracted Macura with its creative power, i.e. its capacity to create something from nothing – hence he understood it as an organic part of movements and gestures, without which the Czech nation would not have arisen as a historical entity. However, this paper also confronts Macura's theoretical concepts with the way he himself went about promoting another nation – the Estonians – another national culture and literature, i.e. as the founder of the Baltic Union, an association that developed from pure prankish play in a relatively respectable institution bringing together Czech and Slovak supporters of the Baltic republics. The author's aim is to demonstrate that we are dealing with a unique situation in which a literary expert examines the mythology of one national culture and at the same time he is an artist who, by using the same mystification key, constructs another national culture, also conceived as a myth and collective play.
Key words: Macura Vladimír – National Revival – Czech literature and culture – Estonian literature and culture – Baltic Union
design by Bedřich Vémola
