Die Dialoge des Lukian von Samosata im literarischen Kontext des tschechischen Klassizismus

Abstract

Summary The study is focused on the reception of the then-popular Dialogues of the Dead / Conversations by Syrian philosopher and rhetorician Lucian of Samosata (120 AD-180 AD) in Czech literature on the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, with occasional insight into the intermediary French and German reception. Thanks to their linguistic refinement, Lucian’s dialogues quickly became a popular reading for the learning of Greek at the time, and in the 18th century, they contributed significantly to the development of journalism. This tendency was also present in the revivalist journal Hlasatel český during the period of 1806–1808 when it featured translations of several of Lucian’s dialogues alongside Jungmann’s conversation On the Czech Tongue (1808). The said conversations evoke the form of Lucianesque dialogues of the dead, which was to be the model of antiquity for the Czech classicism of the time, and they fill this form with thoughts of enlightenment and contemporary nationalism while capitalizing on the models of contemporary educational practices at Prague universities.