Michal Charypar
The end of the world in the view of ''mysterious characters''. Arbes's romanetto Poslední dnové lidstva (Last Days of Mankind)
The author of this paper interprets Jakub Arbes's romanetto Poslední dnové lidstva (Last Days of Mankind) by focusing on the motif of disaster. Rather marginal to his main interest is the episode of censorship when the work was first being published, with the confiscation of a package of the first part, which showed the disaster also affected the residence of the Czech governor Thun. The main objective of this study is to understand the narrative method, which is key to understanding the text and includes the fragmentization of the plot, working with several time zones, a relatively small number of protagonists (the narrator, the priest and the madwoman), fantasy elements, the psychologism that was so popular at that time and intentionally unexplained phenomena. Moreover, the events depicted in Arbes's book may be a mystification or the self-delusion of the subjective authorial narrator.
design by Bedřich Vémola
