Afterword

It is far from easy to explain why Otokar Březina’s work has

provoked in its readers such unusual interest, and why that
interest has persisted until the present day. Nor is it easy to
explain in a way which would lend expression to the reader’s
amazement at Březina’s versatility, as well as at the continual
changes and dynamism of his work, which later played an
indispensable role in the development of modern Czech
poetry and essay writing. From the time Březina’s work began
to appear it was as accepted in the Czech intellectual circles
associated with the journals Moderní revue and Katolická
moderna and distinguished literary and philosophical societies
as it was at workers’ recitation evenings, clearly refuting claims
that his work is exclusive and abstruse. Indeed, the poems and
essays admired by Březina’s contemporaries have lost nothing
of their power and impressiveness today.
Behind the dry official records of Březina’s early years lies
the dramatic inner life of a poet, a life which evolved on an
aesthetic level from naturalism to Symbolism, and on a philo-
sophical level from a decadent pessimism to an evolutionist
affirmation of life.
Otokar Březina was born in Počátky on September 13,
1868 as Václav Ignác Jebavý. The records of the Girls’ Lower
Secondary School register in Jaroměřice nad Rokytnou cast

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light on his external Kierkegaardian “life-stations”: he
attended primary and lower secondary school in Počátky and
a provincial higher secondary school in Telč, and was later
enrolled at schools in Jinošov, Nová Říše, and Jaroměřice.
Perhaps his work as a poet began when as a twelve-year-old
student Václav Jebavý composed a cycle of his verses as a fare-
well present to his schoolmate Alois Čermák. At the higher
secondary school in Telč he experienced his first friendship
with František Bauer, to whom he dedicated some early
poetry. In June 1886 his first lyrical and epic compositions
were published in Jaro (Spring) under the pseudonym Václav
Danšovský. Some time later he began publishing realistic
humoresques, sketches, and long short stories in the maga-
zines Orel and Orlice (The Eagle). In the autumn of 1887 he
met Anna Pammrová in Jinošov. The content of their corre-
spondence — which, except for an interval of three years,
continued until the poet’s final days — has become a testi-
mony to Březina’s enormous determination in his struggle to
find the meaning of life and of creative writing.
By the time of the deaths of both his parents within a
week of each other in February 1890, which was of crucial
importance to the poet’s further spiritual development, he
had worked for two years on the ultimately destroyed and
never-published Román Eduarda Brunnera (The Novel of
Edward Brunner). He read widely from the ancient philoso-
phers and mystics in the Nová Říše monastery library, and for
many years he also studied contemporary poets and thinkers

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(especially Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Poe, Schopenhauer,
and Nietzsche). By 1892 his poems began to appear regularly
in Niva (The Mead) and Vesna (Spring), later in Moderní
revue, Rozhledy (Outlook), Almanach secese (The Art Nouveau
Almanac), and Nov˘ Ïivot (New Life), now under the assumed
name of Otokar Březina.
During the short period when his creative powers were at
their peak, he published five volumes of poetry: Tajemné
dálky (1895; Secret Horizons), Svitání na západû (1896;
Dawn in the West), Vûtry od pólÛ (1897; Winds from the
Poles), Stavitelé chrámÛ (1899; The Temple Builders), and the
long poem Ruce (1901; Hands). These received the notice of
the foremost critics of the day and surpass all other Czech
literature of that period in their importance.
With his reputation as a poet thus established, he turned
his attention to the essay form. The essays that were eventu-
ally to comprise the collection Hudba pramenÛ (The Music of
the Springs) began to appear in periodicals starting in 1897.
In this period his work began to receive formal recognition,
such as a prize for “poetic works to date” from the Svatobor
Association and a similar award from the Czech Academy of
Arts and Sciences. In June 1913, the year of the first complete
edition of his poetic works, Březina was elected an associate
member of the same body, and became a full member in May
1923. In 1919 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from
Charles University in Prague, and by Christmas 1922 he had
been offered an honorary professorship at Masaryk University

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in Brno, which he declined. Perhaps more importantly,
Březina was twice nominated as the Czech candidate for the
Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1921 and 1928). On the occa-
sion of his sixtieth birthday he received a prize from the
Czechoslovak state of one hundred thousand crowns, which
he donated to Svatobor. He died on March 25, 1929 in
Jaroměřice nad Rokytnou.
Beginning at the turn of the century, Březina’s poems and
essays began to appear in magazines and anthologies in many
other languages and complete translations of the first volume
of essays, Hudba pramenÛ, have been published in German
and Swedish. But this edition of Hidden History is the first
complete translation of any of his works to be published in
English.

• • •

In particular it was František Xavier Šalda, the founder

and progenitor of the Czech critical essay, and Otokar
Březina, the most prominent personality of the poetic essay,
who laid the foundations for the future development of this
genre in Czech letters. Březina realized very early on —
stimulated by his reading of Maurice Maeterlinck or by the
oft-repeated demands of his friends and editors — what
versatility was possible in this form of expression. In
December 1896, he informed Anna Pammrová of his decision
to attempt “artistic essays on philosophical topics.” Some time

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later he gave a more detailed explanation to Sigismund Bouška:

I am not opposed to the idea of writing a book of

prose in due time. I will write one. Fiction always
used to be the dream of poets. Charles Baudelaire,
one of the most profound representatives of a whole
new movement (higher and more powerful than
Verlaine, though he did not possess Verlaine’s
enchanting melody of the word), dreamed of it, as
did Mallarmé. One must read such prose as may be
seen in some passages of the mystics, some pages of
Nietzsche, Przybyszewsky, or Péladan, not to mention
others, to believe how much refinement, affection,
profundity, passion, eruptive force may be poured
into several free, unbound sentences, musical and
sparkling with light, soaring from the depths of one
world into another.

It is hardly coincidental, then, that Březina’s essays were first

published in the 1890s — the period when the first and, in
the opinion of many critics, the best essayistic works in Czech
appeared.
Here the essay is understood as a specific form that is of an
artistic, literary-critical, or feuilletonistic nature, on a variety
of subjects, whether literary, philosophical, or socio-cultural.
The author endeavors to gain complete artistic mastery of his
material and therefore abandons scientific efficiency in favor
of the freshness and originality of a freer literary form.
Other features of the genre give it flexibility, such as the

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essay’s conscious subjectivity, a characteristic of this form since
Michel de Montaigne. The author’s subjectivity and origi-
nality are reflected not only in the essay’s composition but
also in its phrasing. It thus stands to reason that this new
mode of self-expression resulted in a form entirely different
from other literary genres. Literary theorists have emphasized
that the essay form can be described as linked to “dialogized
monologue” — turning a monologue into a dialogue or “a
dialogue with oneself.” This can be taken as evidence of the
genre’s experimental character, in the Šaldian sense of the
essay as creative experimentation. Furthermore, the linguistic
form of the essay has its own specific history: at the turn of
the century a high level of stylistic refinement — perhaps
even too high — was required.
F. X. Šalda’s programmatic essays influenced a generation’s
spiritual development. He not only emphasized the need for a
new style, but also underlined the close connections between
life, art, beauty, and work, exhorting artists to participate in
the eternal struggle for a new view of reality and a fresh eval-
uation of artistic expression in all its forms. Šalda’s program
also deeply affected Březina, who in 1892 wrote to František
Bauer his impressions and spoke of Šalda as “one of our first
critics who can breathe the soul of a work of art.” Though
Šalda was not the sole inf luence, he undoubtedly helped
Březina to find his own way through the labyrinth of modern
aesthetics and pointed out to him the basic requirements and
aims embodied in the emerging spirit of Symbolism.

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 At that time Březina stood at a crossroads in life: either he
would retain his previous methods and forms, remaining
fashionable but conventional, or he would embark upon a
course as yet unexplored in his country. He came to the
painful realization that in the changed conditions of the
“new art” outlined by Šalda he could no longer take full
responsibility for The Novel of Edward Brunner and that he
should begin searching for a form different from the thematic
prose of his early writing. Březina thus came to realize the
necessity of creating a prose which would correspond to these
new conditions in every aspect — in intellectual content, in
form, and in linguistic value. And so, just as Šalda in the
sphere of criticism created a unique and unmistakable form
for the essay, so too did Březina in the sphere of poetry.

• • •

The cycle of Březina’s monumental works was concluded

by his fifth volume of poetry, Ruce, but his struggle to grasp
reality only appeared to have been completed. He persisted in
it with no less intensity in his never-completed sixth collec-
tion of verse, Zemû (The Earth). The further elaboration of
the intellectual, thereby clarifying and refining some of the
basic concepts of Březina’s aesthetic vision of the world —
such as beauty, love, joy, and pain — was transferred from
this collection into pieces intended for Hidden History, which
was published, however, only posthumously.

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 Hidden History is first and foremost an artistic expression
of life’s positive quality and one of the richest sources of
Březina’s artistic and aesthetic views. His first volume of essays
was written in the same period as his collections of poetry,
and in a certain sense it completes the spiritual and imagina-
tive process of his verse, drawing it closer to the reader. While
these early essays are still strongly connected with questions of
art, the essays comprising Hidden History shift the focus from
art to life.
Otakar Fiala, Březina’s editor, considered the earlier
volume, written over a period of six years, to be a transitional
book in the sense that it represents a sort of intermediate stage
linking the author’s mature artistic, aesthetic, and philosoph-
ical attitudes with those he had arrived at when he was still
writing verse. After the publication of Hudba pramenÛ in
1905 Březina went through a prolonged period of literary
silence, though his views on art and life did not change to any
considerable degree. Hidden History represents a fuller realiza-
tion of the basic, unifying theme that had appeared in places
in Hudba pramenÛ. In the later volume, individual motifs
continue to mingle and intersect with one another — they are
both interchangeable and changing in a hierarchical manner.
Fiala depicts the totality of these changes thus: “Knowledge is
obtained through work; knowledge leads to unity; unity con-
tains redemption.” Moreover, the essays of Hidden History
represent a well-composed whole. As Fiala has noted:

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 In contrast to Hudba pramenÛ, which is unified by
the poet’s glowing being, illuminating the mysteries
of art and existence, Hidden History offers a closed
system of ideas in a strictly balanced composition that
may be rewritten by a simple mathematical formula:
[3+3+(2+2)]. The first three meditations show the
three different aspects of art which are, essentially:
knowledge in the first meditation, love in the second,
and the struggle for a new human reality in the third.
While refuting ‘art for art’s sake’, Březina is cognizant
only of art for the sake of life. The celebration of life
in all its aspects of beauty and horror is the theme of
the second part of the book, which again contains
three meditations. The third part, containing four
meditations, expands on the aim of humanity and the
means of achieving it.

The central theme of the first group of three — “The Sole

Work,” “A Reflection in the Depths,” and “The Meaning of
Struggle” — is the general question concerning the meaning
of art, which by this time had become for Březina a matter-of-
fact aspect of life. The foremost task of life now is not merely
to heal the deepening skepticism of men, to teach them the
ability to differentiate between good and evil, but rather to
make men and nations brothers through a common vision of
reality. The social function of art is most conspicuous in “The
Meaning of Struggle”: art becomes the most important liber-
ating force in the never-ending fight for a new order in the
world.

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 The second group of essays begins with “The Present,”
which was considered by Březina himself to be the best
expression of his ultimate knowledge, and it may also be taken
as an expression of the poet’s cosmic optimism. This essay
occupies an important place in Hidden History for other rea-
sons as well: it is the last essay written for Šalda and the last
work published during Březina’s lifetime. The celebration of
the present is the leitmotif of the essay — an intensive longing
for a unification of everything and everyone. By imbuing the
earthly struggle of man with cosmic significance, “The
Present” points the way for the essays that were published
only after the author’s death.
“The Work of Death” (1930) was the first of these posthu-
mous essays, and it is essentially the same celebration of life
conquering death as is found in “The Present.” Šalda held
“The Work of Death” in high regard, referring to sentences
worthy of “a present-day Master Eckhart educated in modern
natural and social sciences.” He recognized astutely that this
was far superior and overcame some of the shortcomings of
the early essays. As Šalda observed, these first essays were char-
acterized by “an excessive abstractness of thought, a lack of
analysis consistently directed at the core of reality and as a
result, the overeager optimism of a harmonizer.”
In “Hidden History,” which ultimately lent its name to the
whole volume, Březina came to the conclusion that, in fact,
everything that forms the inner life of a man, a nation, and
the whole earth — and not only the great historical upheavals,

144
but every single, seemingly insignificant event of the human
mind — helps to create the hidden history of humanity.
Language in particular belongs to the basic means through
which humanity achieves the “télos” of this history.
“An Edifice on High” — originally called “Práce” (Labor)
— heads the final grouping of Březina’s “meditations.”
Similar to the poem Ruce, this essay is a supreme celebration
of physical and mental work. The essay “The Word” becomes
an exaltation of language as an instrument of human knowl-
edge and understanding, in which man stores everything that
has been successively acquired through his senses and through
his work. The final essays of Hidden History, “The Glare of
Freedom” and “Peace,” represent the highest values attainable
by humanity in its development.

• • •

Most of the essays comprising Hidden History originated

during the turbulent years of the First World War when
Březina witnessed the pain caused to man by the oppression
of nations and aggression. His extraordinary inner strength
and certainty are proven by the fact that he did not lose his
belief in man and his creative abilities even in those most dif-
ficult years. As Šalda commented:

There are those in this country who think that

Březina was a superficial illusionist who had lost his

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 grip on reality and who composed his architecture of
words on the basis of mirages. This is a great mistake.
Both Březina’s verse and his essays show how tragi-
cally realistic his vision was: his harmonization is usu-
ally painful and does not deny anything of the terrible
dissonances of human fate on this planet. This view is
disciplined and far from the superficial optimism
with which we are inundated nowadays. He knows
only one single redemption from the pain of separa-
tion: through creative work, in love, with ceaseless
energetic effort.

Březina’s “eternal longing” for a harmonization of all con-

tradictions of life and art, further augmented by a detailed
elaboration of form and language, his longing to embrace the
world in the totality of its changes and to arrive at the original
unity of all beings, was the intellectual point of departure for
his generation of artists before World War I. In his sometimes
overly-rich metaphorical language, he strove to express in
words all the infinite changes of the “hidden history” of the
human soul, earth, and cosmos. Although these changes take
place in an invisible manner, as if under the surface, they
nonetheless remain the moving force which underlies all of
life. And it was especially in his essays that he was able to find
the space to contemplate freely all the problems associated
with achieving synthesis. His search for the inner core or uni-
fying meaning of this synthesis — its coherence with truth,
beauty, and action — was a life-long effort. The compelling
inner necessity to satisfy fully and truthfully the need for the
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essence of things, became, if expressed in more general
terms, the concrete expression of man attempting to achieve
unity with himself and the world.
Březina’s creative dream of a “clairvoyant and mysterious
man” visualizes this man from a cosmic perspective without
ever losing sight of his immutable connection with the earth.
Březina’s man, “a single mystic unity in millions who were
and will be,” never surrenders, even though he suffers from
either “the awareness of his insufficiency” or the insufficiency
of his environment. He never waits passively in isolation,
unable to break it, but continues to struggle relentlessly. And
his struggle is not only with his own insufficiency, at the
“decisive moments” of life he struggles to overcome chaos,
fear of death, and even death itself. Death is now visualized
not as the negation, destruction, or termination of everything,
but, paradoxically, as one of the forms which aids in the real-
ization and elaboration of the dream of a higher life on earth.
To know death is also to master it. The most important
tool in realizing this mastery is an active love and conscious
respect for all manifestations and forms of life. It is only
through understanding the deep coherence of love and respect
for life that man can achieve inner freedom. Through a per-
manent fight with death, freedom can also be achieved by a
whole nation. And it was to freedom, as the highest stage of
humanity’s and the individual man’s spiritual development,
that Březina devoted “The Glare of Freedom,” one of his most
characteristic essays.

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 Like the struggle for a richer and fuller life — “the struggle
for everything” of the Czech philosopher Ladislav Klíma —
the struggle with death is fought not only by an individual
but always by a certain community of people. Šalda is correct
in stating that Březina’s dream was never individualistic, but
all-embracing from the very start. Evidence of this is the
manner in which the poet shifts from “I” to “we” in his
poetry, as confirmed by a frequency dictionary: the seventy-
seven occurrences of “I” in Tajemné dálky diminish to only
three in Ruce six years later. Conversely, the four occurrences
of “we” in Tajemné dálky increase to thirty-three in Ruce and
and as many as forty-three in Zemû.
Březina’s concept of redemption through a higher form of
human community is even more evident in his essays, which
frequently return to the themes of social inequality, the
humiliated, poverty, and misery. The poet’s deep conviction
in the importance of spiritual reality leads him to argue for
the permanent necessity of love, a love which is able to over-
come pain. This is the core of Březina’s humanistic ideals of
brotherhood, which are so often emphasized in his art. He
expresses a great longing for a collective, for peace. Indeed the
final essay of this volume, “Peace”, is not only the climax of
the book but also of Březina’s poetic and intellectual activity in
general.

• • •

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 In Czech literary history, Hidden History occupies an
exceptional position by virtue of its equally exceptional char-
acter, even though thus far its importance has not been fully
understood and appreciated. It is considered to be the most
mature example of Czech poetic prose up to that time.
According to the Polish literary critic Józef Zarek, the mere
existence of essays of this caliber is an utter novelty in Czech
literature, calling them “a work so unique that we may have
difficulty in finding analogies with them in present-day litera-
ture.” And a prominent Czech critic, Miroslav Červenka,
stated that these essays are meant to “present the reader with
the drama of ideas themselves, the drama of human collec-
tives, cosmic processes, and even earthly matters.”
While Hidden History undoubtedly contributes to an
understanding of Březina’s poetry, it is also his most intrinsic
and most systematic aesthetic confession, resonating in later
Czech artistic and literary criticism. It was Karel Teige, the
leading theorist of the Czech avant-garde in the interwar
period, who acknowledged Poetism’s debt to Březina in the
movement’s manifesto. Yet the fact that Březina’s essays make
the understanding of his poetic work more accessible does not
mean that we should consider them as mere explanatory com-
mentary on his verse. The essays represent an autonomous
work of art. Even when he was fully occupied with the study
of other thinkers, such as Indian philosophers and medieval
Christian mystics, Březina was conscious of his own art and
preserved his complete independence and critical distance.

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 Březina’s essays remain difficult to classify and they have
occupied an unusual position in Czech and European literature
from the time of their publication. To whatever genre we
assign these essays, the fact remains that Březina gave concrete
expression to Šalda’s principle of synthesism, and he tried to
realize in these essays his theoretical ideas about time, art, and
the human community. Březina’s essays, which turned as far
away as possible from the concreteness of prose, — and this
can also be considered their substantial contribution — inter-
vened in the sphere of poetry and represent a completely new
type of essay writing, unequaled thereafter.

— Petr Holman
Prague, September 1996

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