Bohemian (Cech) Bibliography
A Finding List of Writings in English Relating to Bohemia and the Cechs
Thomas Capek
9781465635556
188 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It sounds incredible, yet it is literally true, that every Slavic nation was, before the war, and probably still is, better known to the English speaking people than the Bohemians (Čechs). What is the reason? That the Bohemians, who are the most literate of all the Slavs, have remained undiscovered may be attributed to three main causes: They are not a free nation. They are a landlocked nation. They are rated a small nation. The opportunities which a seacoast offers to a people, to mention the Dutch, Irish, Belgians, Norwegians, Swedes and Danes, all of whom are numerically smaller than the Bohemian-Slovaks are inestimable. In the forum of world’s commerce and politics, the sea is their powerful sponsor. To a landlocked people this great boon is denied. Inland nations may reach the outside world through an intermediary only, and if that intermediary happens to be a powerful and ungenerous state, the policy of which is to keep its little neighbor in the background, the consequences are obvious. That there live in Central Europe Teutons and none others but Teutons was being daily demonstrated to the Americans by a most convincing proof. Almost every box of merchandise shipped here from that part of the world bore the tell-tale mark “Made in Germany.” Rarely one saw at the terminals goods labelled “Made in Austria,” and rarer still, “Made in Bohemia.” And yet many an article of merchandise thus marked was really made in Bohemia, for parts of Bohemia teem with all kinds of wonderful industries. Because of centuries of political and economic subjection, the very existence of the nation has been lost sight of by the Anglo-Saxons. In the interval between the catastrophal defeat of the Bohemians in 1620 and 1848, the year of revolutionary changes, nothing has occurred in Bohemia to attract the attention of the world to the Bohemian nation. The Seven Years’ War, and later the Napoleonic Wars, were events that concerned not Bohemia as an independent state, but the whole of the Hapsburg Empire. The Russians acquired renown in the first quarter of the nineteenth century by their defeat of Napoleon. Later, during the Crimean War, Russia again came into prominence in the Anglo-American press. Kosciuszko and Pulaski were names to be conjured with by the Polish immigrant. The uprisings in 1830 and in 1863 made sufficiently known to the Americans the ideals and the miseries of Poland. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and the Berlin Congress following it made the English reader familiar with the geography and political ambitions of the Balkan Slavs. The Serbs, the Bulgars, the Montenegrines were successively introduced to the newspaper man and through him to the public at large. Alone the Bohemians remained undiscovered, unknown. Before the war the average reader did not know where Bohemia was located with respect to Austria-Hungary. That ethnically, there might be a difference between a Čech, Hungarian and an Austrian he suspected, yet it was not wholly clear to him wherein the dissimilarity lay. One could cite countless instances of astonishing naiveté concerning the history of the nations which inhabit central and southeastern Europe. Four years ago a journalist and a writer who served on the western front in the capacity of a war correspondent made the astounding discovery that “the ancient Czech (Bohemian) language still continues to be spoken in Prague.”
