how to bring out new qualities in French classicism (Molière or Corneille’s Le Cid); in Kvapil the danger of the sweetly and trivially idyllic—in Hilar the danger of a noisy, angular mannerism; in Kvapil a flood of tried and delicate traditions—in Hilar, in spite of all crudenesses, a glimpse into the future, a will to stride forward into a still unknown and barely guessed-at territory.
We stand on the threshhold of a new theatrical season, and for the time being we can enjoy a production of Lysistrata which has been put on with modest means, but much industry. We are standing, it is to be hoped, before new expressions of a fruitful competitive battle between collectivism and belief in the personality, between tradition and modernity, between the purport of ideas and the problems of form. In all these points the Czech theatrical life touches on tendencies which are to be observed in the other spheres of our literature: in criticism, the lyric, and the novel.
The present state of lyric poetry is interesting and is probably also nearing a crisis. The sensualist and erotic, the ideological poet of cosmopolitan schooling, the extensive translator, Jaroslav Urchlicky, has left his disciples as a most valuable legacy the instrument of a richly resounding poetic language. The lyric masters of the generation of the Nineties, Otakar Brèfina and Antonia Sova, have admitted Czech poetry to new depths, have extended its scope to social problems and mystical insight. Among the younger contemporary lyric artists, a numerous group is gathered about the former anarchist and present champion of communistic ideas, Stanislav K. Neumann, who is unfolding a programme of so-called “civilized” poetry, and in a free rhythm that often verges close on to prose sings the facts of ordinary life: the humming of telegraph wires, the swinging and churning of factory machines, but also his collectivistic expectations, and his violent love-hunger. Otakar Theer, who died young, and who was another theorizer and practitioner of vers libre, made the lyric serve for ethical problems. Yet in a succession of first books, among which the intimate and social ballads of Jiri Wolker are especially prominent, a turn away from individualistic ethics and national ideals is noticeable: the culmination of the social tendency is not marked by this or that adventurous débutant, but by the ripe and logical thinker, Josef Hora.
Sharply opposed to him is a writer already named as a dramatist,
