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In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline - a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered only in the margins of other people's stories. In The Coasts of Bohemia, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective.
Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theater of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition.
Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored.
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1
Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History
2020, Princeton University Press
in English
0691214433 9780691214436
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2
The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History
February 28, 2000, Princeton University Press
Paperback
in English
- New Ed edition
069105052X 9780691050522
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3
The coasts of Bohemia: a Czech history
1998, Princeton University Press
in English
0691057605 9780691057606
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4
The coasts of Bohemia: a Czech history
1998, Princeton University Press
in English
0691057605 9780691057606
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"FEW ARTISTS so obviously evoke a period and a place as Alphonse Mucha."
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