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Review
A rich and intricate story.... Excellent ... the most stimulating introduction to [its] subject available in English, or ... any other language. -- R.J.W. Evans, New York Review of Books
Sayer's penetrating and balanced discussion of Czech political and cultural history should spare us from ever again thinking of the central European place as 'a far away country'. -- Stan Persky, Vancouver Sun
A masterful essay on the ironies and tragedies of both the cultural history of the Czechs and Czech culture's history of its own past. -- Steven Beller, The Times Literary Supplement
Product Description
In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline--a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered only in the margins of other people's stories. In The Coasts of Bohemia, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a comprehensive and long-needed history of the Czech people that is also a remarkably original history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy center.
Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theater of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe; and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored.
The Coasts of Bohemia draws on an enormous array of literary, musical, visual, and documentary sources ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into intimate contact with the ever changing details of daily life--the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps--that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech. Sayer's sustained concern with questions of identity, memory, and power place the book at the heart of contemporary intellectual debate. It is an extraordinary story, beautifully told.
FEW ARTISTS so obviously evoke a period and a place as Alphonse Mucha. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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The back of the book makes the claim that the book is a "comprehensive history of the Czech people." Unfortunately this is not true. Turn to any page and instead of reading about an event in Czech history, you will read about a sculptor or magazine editor and how they felt about some event that is never actually explained. The book is a struggle to get through if you are not already familiar with the history of Bohemia. If you don't know much about the Slansky trials of the early 1950's, don't expect to know more after reading this book other than what books were banned. And for some unexplained reason, the author decided to end his book in 1960, just before the the reforms that led to the Velvet Revolution. I learned much more about Czech history reading "Under the Cruel Star" than I did reading this book.
Perhaps the book would have been better off described as a review of art and literature in Bohemia up until 1960. At least the book would have been more accurate in its description. After reading this book, I do not feel that I understand the people of the Czech Republic any better than when I started. I can truly say that this is a book that I did not enjoy reading in the least. If ever there was a book that made me feel I wasted my money, this is that book.
Sayer is quite convincing in making his major arguments: that the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia are rightly viewed as having stood for centuries at the center of European history; that Czech national identity, created virtually from scratch in the 19th century, exemplifies a complexly and authentically modern process of self-invention; and that the echoes, ironies, and reversals of Czech history hold valuable lessons for Westerners whose notions of "Eastern European" exoticism and backwardness are rivaled, in their ingenuousness, only by our belief in history as progress. He shows in vivid detail how history and historically derived notions of collective identity are refracted in the service of politics and power--and not only by totalitarian regimes. (In one of the book's most disturbingly persuasive sections, Sayer shows how Communism--far from being the wholly alien import that many Czechs would now prefer to see it as--took root in soil that had been well, if unwittingly, prepared by 150 years of often liberal Czech nationalist ideology.) Throughout "The Coasts of Bohemia," he provides a lavishly and (one comes to understand) lovingly detailed journey through the collective psyche of a fascinating nation--though Sayers' love for the Czechs and for Czech culture, we also come to suspect, is fiercely complicated and deeply ambivalent.
It should also be said that Sayers' book is just about a perfect model of what a scholarly book should be: massively detailed but carefully, even dramatically, shaped and organized; filled with concrete particulars but always letting the reader see their relation to the grand themes; stringen! tly reasoned but deeply felt; and extremely well written, illustrated, annotated, and indexed. In all, an extremely intelligent, learned, and sophisticated book that is also a great read.
The book is a bright but isolated star in the realm of scholarship that explains the Czech lands and people to the citizens of the United States. Sayers has a firm grasp on the little things, "the quotidian," that make up cultural identity, but it is his writing style and his ability to weave small points into major themes that makes the book such a masterpiece.
I note with mixed feelings that Sayers works and teaches in Canada. The English-speaking world's gain; America's loss.
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