Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic

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Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic around 1930

Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic , actually Josef Karásek (born January 24, 1871 in Smíchov , today part of Prague , † March 5, 1951 in Prague) was a Czech representative and supporter of decadence .

Life

Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic came from a petty bourgeois family. With the beginning of his literary activity he began to ascribe the nobility attribute of the astronomer and mathematician Cyprián Lvovický ze Lvovic from the 16th century. After graduating from high school, he studied at the Prague Theological Faculty for almost two years, lived in Bavaria for a year, after returning in 1891 became a postal worker, later director of the library of the postal ministry and finally director of the postal museum and its archive.

Together with Arnošt Procházka , he founded Moderní revue (1894–1925) in 1894 , in which the works of many young writers (e.g. the brothers Josef and Karel Čapek ) were published for the first time.

As a bachelor he led a secluded life, almost never left Prague and devoted himself entirely to literary creation and the collection of books and art. He founded the largest collection of paintings, graphics and books of Slavic art (Karáskova Gallery).

Karásek ze Lvovic was a supporter of Impressionist criticism and is considered an important literary critic. In most of his works he combines neo-romantic fantasy with sophistication. His poetry and prose are masterpieces of the literary style around 1900. A few works (Die Gothic Seele, 1900/1905) can be counted among the most important works of European decadence because of the almost complete abstraction of the style and the homogeneity of the text.

From 1932 to 1934 he was a member of the editorial board of the first Czech gay magazine , Nový hlas .

Works

1st phase (iuvenil)

  • 1893 Bezcestí (hopelessness, novel, later unrecognized by the author)
  • 1894 Zazděná okna (Walled-up Windows, Poems)

2nd phase

  • 1895 Sodoma (p., Poems, censored)
  • 1896 Kniha aristokratická (The Aristocratic Book)
  • 1897 Sexus necans (p. N., Poems)
  • 1900 Gotická duše (The Gothic Soul, novel)
  • 1905 Gotická duše (The Gothic Soul, 2nd version)

3rd phase

  • Romány tří mágů (Novels of the Three Magi): Román Manfreda Macmillena (1907), Scarabeus (1908), Ganymedes (1925)

4th phase

  • 1946 Poslední vinobraní (The Last Grape Harvest, Poems)

Excerpts (translated):

Vain! The thoughts dry up like grass in the midday heat!
The only one that remains: the longing for another life.
But the impotence hangs in the air of the exhausted times.
One lives long and without magic there is the illusion that one could live differently!

(...)

Everything hangs flatly and as if being weighed down by an invisible force.
Nights in vain tremble over the bed on which sleep never falls.
Gray, extinct days see in Spleens the lonely
like hideous, persevering, alms-awaiting blind people.

(...)

Understanding

Je l'aime pour ta douleur ... Péladan

You who have the soul of the one who looked for me in the past beings. In the trembling of your hand I feel approach and favor that I have long since won.

You have filled the chambers of my soul like a fragrance that is too penetrating. You have enlivened and waved through their mourning, as if a wedding procession waved through the gloomy shadows of an old minster.

Your smile is like a veil of flowing material, thrown on a dead face. Your voice is veiled and dark like drumbeats at the funerals of murdered regents.

In darkened and extinct streets, where the times have hung their glorious silence, do you want us to flow together, like back then, when we thwarted the youth here, two monks over old parchments, two faded moon faces over the colored wonders of the missals?

(...)

biography

  • Jetřich Lipanský: Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, 1929

Web links

Commons : Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karla Huebner: The Whole World Revolves Around It - Sex Education and Sex Reform in First Republic Czech Print Media in: aspasia, 4th year, 2010, pp. 37-39
personal data
SURNAME Karásek ze Lvovic, Jiří
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech representative and supporter of decadence
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Smíchov, now part of Prague
DATE OF DEATH March 5, 1951
Place of death Prague