Success and its Relativization: General Remarks on the Fate of Literary Works and their Authors (Specific Features of Czech Literature)

Abstract

The author of the present paper deals with the general features of success of literary artefacts on the examples of several Czech authors. Regardless of some typical cases going back to the 19th century, among others a famous one connected with the name of possibly the only real Czech romantic Karel Hynek Mácha, probably the most significant romantic poet in the world observed from the point of view of poetics and artistic values and existential angles, there are quite a lot of interesting 20th-21st-century authors whose success on the one hand and loss of popularity on the other signalled the causes of the whole process and its markers. While the 19th-century authors and the success of their work were linked with the preparedness of the reading public, with aesthetic tastes and prevalent styles, more modern literature since modernism has been connected, besides the mentioned factors, more with political shifts of emphasis and with the whole social atmosphere; it also depends on the thematic and genre structure of literary artefacts, on the problems dealt with, on the degree of experimentalism. The examples of several Czech 20th-century authors demonstrate various aspects of the problem of the markers of succes and their association with their creative individuality.