On 27 February 2024, the first-ever Day of Folks Costume was held within the decrease home of the Czech parliament. Initiated by three politicians from the events ANO and TOP 09, it opened with an exhibition of folks costumes recreated from historic fashions. The occasion was reprised a 12 months later as ‘The Day of Folks Costumes and Areas within the Chamber of Deputies’, below the patronage of the Speaker, Markéta Pekarová Adamová (TOP 09). This time there was additionally a parade and folklore pageant full with choral singing and regional gastronomy.
The primary iteration of the pageant was introduced whereas I used to be writing my thesis on folklore in modern literature and society. I watched in amazement at actual life offering a steady stream of proof for the return of folklore into tradition and society, and never simply in Moravia, the a part of the nation historically related to folklore. As soon as on the periphery, folklore has now reached the centre and – paradoxical as it might sound – has begun to take root in Czechia’s globalised capital.
A reservoir of folklore
From a theoretical perspective, the reason would appear apparent: in occasions of disaster, society goes looking for traditions that greatest match its perceived id. Folklore is often understood as being synonymous with custom and to be the ‘most autochthonous’ ingredient inherited from earlier occasions.
Folklore thus serves because the foundational fantasy of our society. Within the nineteenth century, Romantics and champions of the Nationwide Revival helped to vogue this fantasy not solely by means of the gathering of folks songs and the forging of historic manuscripts, but additionally by creating their very own variations on the themes and motifs present in folklore.
It’s the final of those approaches that hyperlinks our personal time to the period that noticed the beginning of the idea of folklore. In fact, literature is free to borrow from any supply it chooses, albeit inside limits that change with time. These days these are outlined primarily by moral issues.
Because the thinker and anthropologist Joseph Grim Feinberg factors out, the postcolonial flip introduced a flip in direction of folklore, opening the doorways to voices and traditions that had lengthy been silenced. The orientalising distinction between, on the one hand, ‘folklore’ or ‘folks artwork’ as a part of the European custom, and ‘indigenous artwork’ because the cultural product of non-European nations and ethnic teams on the opposite, has change into blurred. Consequently, folklore has change into an umbrella time period for numerous sorts of folks artwork, typically the type that’s hand-made.
A altering discourse
The continuity of discourse on folklore within the Czech context has been lined by a number of publications. They embrace the collective work, ‘The load and weightlessness of folklore: The folklore revival motion of the second half of the 20th century within the Czech lands’ (2021), edited by the knowledgeable folklorist and historian Daniela Stavělová. The introduction contextualises developments since 1989, when post-communist dissident discourse referred to folklore as practised below communism as a ‘escapist’ and ‘a pretence’. This attitude was rejected solely within the 2010s, a change the authors consider was related to the end result of the 2013 and 2017 parliamentary elections (gained, respectively, by the Czech Social Democratic Celebration, ČSSD, and Andrej Babiš’s occasion ANO), as effectively to the ‘revisionist’ flip in historic research.
As a substitute of being perceived as an act of ‘collaboration’, folklore now began to be considered ‘intangible cultural heritage’, as outlined within the Conference for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage adopted by UNESCO in 2003. The UNESCO record contains such conventional gadgets or pursuits as fujara, the Slovak overtone flute; European resist printing referred to as indigo dyeing (Blaudruck/Modrotisk/Kékfestés/Modrotlač); Czech and Slovak puppetry, and the Journey of the Kings, a convention nonetheless maintained within the Moravian area of Slovácko.
Within the case of Slovakia, an excellent introduction to the topic is supplied by Feinberg’s foreword to the Slovak translation of his e-book The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Efficiency in Publish-Communist Slovakia (2018), an ethnographic and philosophical investigation of folks dancing in Košice within the 2010s. Feinberg places his analysis within the modern political context – the e-book was revealed three years after the ‘refugee disaster’ of 2015, an occasion he associates with the radicalisation of part of Slovak society and the rise of a brand new wave of nationalism, which in 2016 carried a neofascist occasion – Marián Kotleba’s The Individuals’s Celebration Our Slovakia (ĽSNS) – into parliament for the primary time.
In his assortment of essays ‘Publish-peasants: Slovakia’s folks protest’, the Slovak anthropologist Juraj Buzalka seeks the supply of this radicalisation within the legacy of village mentality, which he believes nonetheless types the core of Slovak society and tradition. In his view, ‘post-peasants’ are characterised by their opposition to globalisation and the mistrust of elites, which helps to nurture populist actions. The sociologist Dominik Želinský challenges such an understanding, arguing that the current state of Slovak politics has been led to by energy relations and the media, and can’t be diminished to simplistic formulae and stereotypes. However, a conservative understanding of folklore stays the idea of Slovakia’s id.
The ‘Final Goddess’ impact
Within the first decade of this millennium, folklore started to maneuver nearer to the centre of social and cultural consideration, additionally in Czech literature. Versus a robust regional present in modern Slovak literature, the authors of a collection of publications mapping modern Czech literature because the Nineties current don’t regard the regional side or the dichotomy of metropolis and village as significantly vital. Nor do they view the ‘village novel’ (a time period utilized primarily to the writing of Jiří Hájíček) by means of the prism of folklore. As a substitute, they see the primary trajectories of current Czech literature as converging on reminiscence and the previous.
However, the folklore perspective can show fruitful when discussing sure prose works written since 2010, because it opens a door to the comparability of various nationwide literatures – not simply in Central Europe but additionally, for instance, the modern hispanophone folk-horror feminist motion. It additionally allows us to strategy a specific nationwide literature from a special approach and uncover sudden literary relationships between disparate authors. Each Kateřina Tučková and Olga Tokarczuk, for instance, will be seen as constructing on the work of the nineteenth-century Czech author Božena Němcová.
The folklore perspective additionally factors to the gendered nature of the pattern in literature. Many novels by girls writers characteristic protagonists who take up handicrafts as a manner of shaping their female id. A proof will be present in feminist theories that foreground the silencing of girls and their systematic exclusion from dominant discourses, as superior by students comparable to Mary Beard and Magdalena Szczuka. Right here folklore serves as a helpful various supply. The treasure trove of folks storytelling is extensively accessible, and its guidelines have been steadily loosening, however not like myths which might be common, folklore is rooted regionally.
One of many bestselling books of the 2010s was Kateřina Tučková’s novel Žitkovské bohyně (The Final Goddess, English translation 2012). It’s set within the area of Moravské Kopanice on the Czech and Slovak borderland, historically visited by folks looking for therapy from native goddesses. In contrast to in Šeptuchy (‘Whisperers’, 2019) by the Slovak Alena Sabuchová, Tučková’s goddesses are frozen of their historic illustration, which the protagonist, or maybe the creator herself, has present in archives. The e-book ends in tragedy, signalling the tip of a convention steadily overcome by successive regimes in cahoots with the patriarchy.
Tučková is correct to warn girls in regards to the evil of the world, however the identical can’t be mentioned of her framing of lesbian relationships as pathological, or of her exoticisation of Slovakia. However, she shares with Slovak girls authors a (pseudo)ethnographic framework much like that widespread in nineteenth-century Czech literature by girls writers comparable to Božena Němcová and Karolina Světlá.
The protagonist of Anna Bolavá’s 2015 novel Do tmy (‘Into darkness’) is a translator and herb-gatherer who succumbs to an sickness pushed by her obsessive gathering. As in Tučková’s novel, the conclusion doesn’t augur a shiny future for womankind – its motifs of invisibility and infertility recommend quite the alternative, equally to the motif of disappearing in Klára Vlasáková’s Těla (‘Our bodies’, 2023).
The second a part of Bolavá’s trilogy, Ke dnu (‘Right down to the underside’, 2017), depicts social life in a provincial city; within the concluding half, Po potopě (‘After the deluge’, 2020), the mythologising framework reaches its apex within the determine of the daddy, who’s a water goblin. Bolavá is certainly one of solely few modern Czech authors who has succeeded in embedding folklore traditions in our post-modern world whereas forging a particular language and poetics.
Whisperers, embroidery and drag
The folkloristic pattern of the 2010s in Slovak literature culminated in books longlisted in 2019 for the Anasoft Litera prize, the nation’s important literary award. On the shortlist, Katarína Kucbelová’s Čepiec (The Bonnet, English translation 2024) went head-to-head with the winner, Alena Sabuchová’s Šeptuchy (‘Whisperers’), whereas the longlist included Svätyne (‘Sanctuaries’), a novel by Dominika Madro. Though critics lumped them right into a single present, labelled ethnographic-mythical or folklore-magical, the poetics of those three authors differ radically.
In her first work of prose, the poet Katarína Kucbelová launched into an auto-ethnographic exploration of artwork, mixing her and her grandmother’s story with the lifetime of an aged villager within the Decrease Tatras, to whom she turned to be taught the artwork of embroidering bonnets, part of the normal folks costume. Kucbelová overtly depicts her mistrust of latest folklore and is simply as frank in revealing her sense of uprootedness and need to place down roots. She succeeds on this endeavour whereas highlighting the gender continuity these traditions contain. Her narrator doesn’t thoughts leaving her bonnet unfinished: her work will probably be accomplished by another person, maybe her daughter or a descendant.
Though Sabuchová additionally carried out ethnographic analysis on the Polish-Belarussian border, she took a unique strategy. Whereas recording the exact time and placement, illustrated by images, the story she tells is fictitious. Her protagonist returns to locations the place she grew up, the place she encounters spirits of the useless, together with that of her greatest pal. By means of the characters of feminine (and in a single case male) folks healers, Sabuchová explores the theme of particularly feminine loneliness as skilled by widows, single feminine lecturers, or just girls and not using a associate. Her feminine characters create new rituals that problem each the patriarchy and the church.
Dominika Madro’s Sanctuaries, probably the most lyrical of those three books, is the ballad-like story of a girl whose relationship ends tragically in opposition to the fog-bound backdrop of a hamlet in Myjava, a area in western Slovakia. Madro’s poetics is much like that of Nineteen Forties lyrical fiction, a style of Slovak literature made well-known by authors comparable to František Švantner and Margita Figuli. Madro, like Bolavá, Vlasáková and Zuzana Říhová, additionally offers with the topic of infertility. The pessimistic conclusion of her e-book is akin to the endings of novels by these Czech girls writers.
Whereas folklore will not be absent from novels by modern male authors, they don’t use it as a framework for analyzing their masculine id. For instance, Maroš Krajňak’s Stalker-like trilogy, which opened with the novel Carpathia (2015), focuses on the cultural reminiscence of the Ruthenian neighborhood on the verge of extinction. Lukáš Luk explored regional or Slovak id in his humorous trilogy set on the river Váh. Slovak-born Miroslav Hlaučo, the creator of the novel Letnice (2023, Pentecost), the 2015 winner of the main Czech literary award, Magnesia Litera, resorts to straightforward gender stereotypes, together with a love triangle.
Parts of folklore additionally characteristic in works of literary reportage, as an example Slon na Zemplíne (‘The elephant in Zemplín’, 2018) by Andrej Bán, though he’s primarily occupied with Slovak id. Additionally price mentioning is Matěj Hořava’s Pálenka (‘Distilled spirits’, 2014), a e-book whose lyrical and nostalgic type is akin to that of Carpathia. It might be arduous to seek out parts of folklore and fantasy on this planet of Hájíček’s village novels and their protagonists in pursuit of ‘genealogical analysis’.
Against this, Slovak author and musician Jakub Spevák attracts on biblical imagery within the exploration of the village atmosphere, and explicitly references folklore within the autobiographical work Všetko, čo som ti nestihol povedať (‘Every part I by no means managed to let you know’, 2025). Addressing his deceased father, the novel additionally covers the intersection of drag and folklore, the latter turning into an instrument for greedy his personal queer id, in an strategy much like the feminine writers talked about earlier.
Obsession and neighborhood
So which facets and types of tradition are highlighted by modern literature – significantly that written by girls? For some, like Katarína Kucbelová in The Bonnet, folklore represents a bonding ingredient that creates continuity. For others it represents a neighborhood, its rituals serving to to bind us all collectively, as within the case of the lonely widows within the cemetery in The Whisperers.
The time period folklore is usually used within the plural within the sense of human archetypes being handed on, as within the quick story assortment Dom pre jeleňa (‘The deer home’, 2022) by Dominika Moravčíková, in addition to in her debut poetry assortment Deti Hamelnu (2020, The Kids of Hameln). In Anna Bolavá’s trilogy, set within the fictitious city of Řečovice, folklore is linked with obsession and is unable to outlive within the new neoliberal order. Kateřina Tučková’s The Final Goddess presents the dying out of folklore as a human and, significantly girls’s, tragedy.
The literary strategies employed by these girls writers to embed their themes within the framework of folklore intersect with these typical of the authorial fantasy, as outlined by the literary historian Blanka Činátlová: they embrace the depiction of pre-modern conventional society, the cyclical nature of time in opposition to the backdrop of Historical past with capital H, and the cathartic operate handed down by means of conventional myths.
Since these girls authors draw extra on folklore than fantasy, a extra apposite time period to explain their work is likely to be authorial folklore, one thing that can also be present in different types of artwork. That’s actually true of music – a component of Czech folks music has advanced into a brand new folklore redolent of town in addition to of the woods. In experimental initiatives comparable to Spievanky (2024, Ditties) by the Czech-Slovak free-folk duo Púčik, folklore can also be utilized in an ironic reappropriation of custom, on this case, to border the expertise of trans folks.
New folks bands and songwriters, comparable to Severní nástupiště (‘Northern Platform’), DOHOR (‘To the Mountains’), Cardo Decumanus and Člověk krve (‘The Man of Blood’) don’t shrink back from the theatrical pathos whose revival has been noticed in literature, significantly poetry. An excellent instance is the writing of Tereza Šustková and her assortment Koutnice (2024), which carries a Christian message but additionally the poetics of ache, harking back to the novels of Madro, Bolavá and Říhová.
Like these authors, Klára Krásenská gravitates in her poetry to the village, Christian spirituality and nature-inspired lyrical poetry. Each Šustková and Krásenská present an affinity with cottagecore aesthetics, as mirrored within the latter’s instagram account (@klara.krsnsk). In Slovak poetry comparable tendencies will be noticed within the work of Dominika Moravčíková, in addition to in that of Jela Abasová, who writes quasi-mythological poetry in addition to haikus. She alternates between extra epic poetry that includes fairytale characters comparable to Všeded (‘Allgrandfather’) and Strombaba (‘Treewoman’) and quick scenes of village life. And Patrícia Gabrišová’s debut poetry assortment options folklore motives related to water, comparable to mermaids.
Two types of folklore
Gendering is far much less pronounced in poetry. Though the themes fluctuate (with maternity remaining key for ladies poets), male poets additionally regularly draw on folklore of their work. Miloš Doležal, who makes use of a quote from Erben’s The Bouquet as an epigraph for his assortment Jana bude brzy sbírat lipový květ (‘Jana will quickly collect linden blossoms’, 2022), associates girls with herb-gathering, as does Bolavá. By making Job the lyrical topic of his poems, Doležal straight challenges God about his arduous lot and the lack of his beloved spouse.
Vojtěch Štěpán’s poetry additionally options spirituality carefully linked to fantasy, whereas Petr Šmíd’s poems draw on numerous types of folklore, as he populates his texts with invented folklore-like beings comparable to Oškrda Haštal or Paškrt Smolinka and invents new nursery rhymes and proverbs. He presents a number of forms of nation starting from ‘a rustic of absorption’, which he believes by no means to have existed, by means of a ‘nation of labor’ which not exists, to a ‘comedic nation’ nonetheless surviving in a number of remaining relics.
Authorial folklore is subsequently a type of individualisation and advertising and marketing ploy below an creator’s model (the one choice as we speak). But it surely additionally enriches literature with new sorts of poetics, first seen in Czech literature in The Final Goddess, later within the Řečkovice trilogy, Pentecost and, most not too long ago, thrillers by Petra Klabouchová. This pattern is much more pronounced in Slovak literature, the place this mythic-ethnographic motion (or just, folkloristic literature, if we select to discuss with it that manner) now represents a key path.
Joseph Grim Feinberg distinguishes between two varieties of latest folklore-related artwork: the ‘tragic’ selection, typical of the post-Communist interval; and a later, various or utopian, ‘radically historic’ selection. Tragic folklore is a becoming time period for works by many Czech girls writers talked about on this article. A substantial proportion of current writing, nevertheless, is the product of the brand new, ‘radically historic’, folklore, which pushes playfully in opposition to the established hierarchies from under, no matter any pageantry staged in parliament.
This translation has been supported by the Ministry of Tradition of the Czech Republic
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