Übergang zur modernen sorbischen Poesie

Abstract

Summary The Sorbian poet Jurij Chěžka (1917–1944), who suffered an early death, composed a body of poetry of “secondary” meanings between 1936 and 1938 as a student in Bohemia, which comprised about 50 poems. In these poems he combined themes such as his mother, his homeland, his people and death with national aspects of the Slav minority in Lusatia. Faced with the threat from the Nazi regime he created a new literary reality, whilst establishing links with concepts from the Czech symbolist movement. With his modernist revolt he at the same time set up a movement towards equal standing for the second autonomous line of evolution of Sorbian literature. His innovative aesthetic heritage became an important starting point for the distinctive development of Sorbian lyric poetry in the second half of the 20th Century.