Ladislav Futtera
Coachmen and Their World as Reflected in Czech Literature of the Late “Long” 19th Century
The construction of the main railway network in the Czech lands in the late 1860s and early 1870s led to the disappearance of long-distance road freight transport provided by horse-drawn carriages. At the same time, the literary image of this profession began to take shape in the works of writers adhering to realistic poetics. In the prose texts published between the 1880s and the noughties of the 20th century, a nostalgic-idyllic image of the figure of coachman prevailed (traceable in Czech literature back to Božena Němcová's short story Dobrý člověk [The Good Man] from 1858), conceived under the impression of the demise of the profession. With the help of romanticising clichés and topoi, the coachmen were presented as representatives of a specific subculture with a defined social and cultural space (roads and roadside inns) and behavioural patterns (sincere earthiness, shrewdness...). These distinguished the coachmen from postilions, who were restrained by their service obligations, and urban freight forwarders, who were focused on capitalising on profit.
Coachmen facilitated social communication between the rural and urban environments, but the bulk of the analysed texts situate them in the vicinity of the rural peasant environment from which they arose and which they are able to re-enter. The fictional worlds of prose, on the other hand, emphasize the barrier in the urban environment that prevents coachmen from being transformed into forwarders (which was common in the real world). The negative facets of the image of a coachman, present in the prose works by Karel Klostermann or Jindřich Šimon Baar, are motivated by fears of uprootedness and of losing the almost mystically understood relationship to the land that these works construe. Karel Václav Rais's work addresses the personal freedom of coachmen hired for the needs of factories. However, this individual lack of freedom is linked to a nationalist perspective - the German ethnicity of the coachmen that are viewed in this negative way.
Keywords: coachmen - postilions - forwarders - image of coachmen in literature- nostalgia
design by Bedřich Vémola
