Contenu du sommaire : Rêve et utopie dans la littérature tchèque

Strange Coincidences Marguerite Yourcenar and Julius Zeyer The Oriental stories of Julius Zeyer (Evening Party by Idalia, 1892) and Marguerite Yourcenar (How Wang-Fô Was Saved, 1936) have similar plots : a picture becomes a new reality and enables the painter to escape from the world of vulgarity, cruelty and insensibility. In the Czech story, the painter commissioned to decorate the wall surroundig the emperor's garden rejets the praise of the dignitaries who find the highest value of art in its likeness to reality. The art that tends to discover what is unknown is superior to nature. The artist quits the society unable to understand him, disappears in the painting which vanishes before the dumbfounded public and the emperor's daughter who has faith in his art disappears with him. In Marguerite Yourcenar's story, an old painter, accused of lying, is sentenced to death : his pictures were more beautiful than reality. However he is ordered to finish one of his pictures deposited in the emporer's collections. He paints the sea with a boat, water inundates the hall, he goes on board, finds there his disciple, who had been beheaded but has been ressuscitated, and they both disappear in the painting. The picture vanishes before the dignitaries, the hall becomes dry again. In both cases art saves the heroes — in Zeyer's story from vulgarity, in Marguerite Yourcenar's, from death. But art gives not only blessedness and life, it also brings suffering and destruction. The wife of the painter's disciple commits suicide because her husband prefers her portraits to her living self, and in another of Zeyer's stories, the hero compares art with crime. The narrative fiction provides an introduction to aesthetic and philosophical reflections.

Doubts and Dream in Josef Čapek's Prose Collection Lelio The goal of this article is to demonstrate that dream is not only a central theme in Josef Čapek's prose, which is varied and developped by the author in Lelio, his prose collection from 1917, but is also a technique of modern art that the artist investigates. The main focus of the dream topic and the dream technique lies on the narratives Lelio (1914) and Rukopis, nalezený na ulici (1915). Searching for modern artistic approaches in painting and poetry Josef Čapek chooses techniques which enlight both, visionary and irreal aspects of the depicted objects. They radically differ from classical procedures in art. In Lelio, a text illustrating dream as an intoxicational state similar to death in Berlioz' early version already, the alienated and unreliable perspective chosen by Čapek leads to uncertanity concerning all categories of the depicted individuals, objects and situations. The transgression of given borders of identity, materiality and mediality is creating an alternative duplex world. In Rukopis, nalezený na ulici Čapek developpes the theme of dream in a diffent way. He puts it as a shadow which depends on a source and compares it to the characters in a manuscript. Then he follows the literary tradition of Antiquity and its conception of „ eidola“, pictures composing a vision. In this tradition dream is understood as a picture which reflects its prefiguration. In Čapek's text dream is a vision which enables to anticipate the future existence. The dream as a creative technique of modern art does not stand here for an illusion. It allows the understanding of the object's true identity and leads to a truthful view of man and his world.

The Novel as an Emblematic Developing of a Dream : On the Topic of Dream in Milan Kundera's Work The study is focused on the motif (or rather subject matter) of dream in Milan Kundera's work. The examination of this motif doesn't restrict itself neither to Kundera's authorial comments nor to the frequency of this motif in his writings. Dream (dreamy experience) is treated here as the proper origin (birth, cause, motif) of writing (narration, novel). Since the author can be declared as the interpreter of dreams, it is in this way possible to reconstruct originality (and origin) of authorial subject (which classical narratology systematically suppressed). This also enables to inscribe non-textual subjects (author and reader) into the space of semiosis. From this point of view it's possible to infer that the reader finds common ground with the author only insofar as the reader handles the novel as the developing analogy instead of insisting on distinctive objectiveness.

Dream as an Opening and a Proof of the Multiplicity of Life The Pursuit of ‘ Another' Reality in the Work of Věra Linhartová The study concentrates on the theme of dream in the work of Věra Linhartová, who herself closely dealt with the problem in her own critical studies on Richard Weiner, Jindřich Štyrský or Jindřich Heisler. In her fictional works, Linhartová was influenced by the concepts of dream developed by Gérard de Nerval, Richard Weiner and the authors belonging to Le Grand Jeu. Linhartová, however, transformed their ideas in her original way : in her texts from the 1960s, she used the motive of a dream mostly to illuminate the relation between reality and fiction from the point of view of the process of creation and reception of a literary work. Her later poems in prose, written in French and collected in Mes oubliettes, can be considered as written records of poetic (open-eyed) dreaming and contemplation.

The Apocryphal Metamorphoses of Judas in Contemporary Czech Prose The essay deals with the inter-textual metamorphoses of the characters of Judas in contemporary Czech apocryphal re-workings of evangel pre-texts. The novels Judas ´ Cross (Kříž Jidášův, 1988) by L. Tomek, The Lord of the Tower (Pán věže, 1992) by E. Kantůrková and The Lamb (Beránek, 2000) by L. Procházková and stories Judas (Jidáš, 2002) by J. Vácha and The Evangelist (Evangelista, 2004) by I. Dousková are the main subjects of presented analyses and comparisons. The essay examines the typical changes in characterization of Judas, therein after pays attention to modifications of roles that the character of Judas plays in the apocryphal versions of the gospel story. Simultaneously the essay does not omit various exchanges and disguising of identity of this character. While the character of Judas is the definite type in the New Testament, the produced apocryphal metamorphoses tend to the semantic inception of this character : the character of Judas is involved in unexpected analogies and parallels, becomes the part of allegorical depiction of reality or becomes the bearer of philosophizing sentences.

The Persistent Use of the Absurd in Post-1989 Czech Dramatic Art The quest of the existence of the world and its uncertain boundaries runs the risk of confronting itself with existentialist fears. Both contemporary Czech playwrights Antonín Přidal and Petr Zelenka who wrote respectively Noc potom and Příběhy obyčejného šílentsví (2001), give us two plays with the notion of the Absurd, thus perpetrating the Czech literary tradition. Pridal's ‘ in camera' gives a vision of an illogical dreamlike universe in which Blanche, the protagonist accused of being a nark for the communist regime, is looking for a meaning to her life while dreaming of finding the witness who will rehabilitate her. With Zelenka, Petr can't face the brutal reality of the world and sinks deep into a grotesque madness which will lead him to committing suicide, a suicide his mother had foreseen in her dream. Both plays reflect the post-1989 society without being political pamphlets and invite us to encounter characters who are incapable of adapting to today's world.