Znaky a přízraky

This thematically organized selection from the works of Xavier Galmiche (*1963), a French specialist in Czech studies, presents 40 studies from the years 2000–2021. In addition to texts on the spiritual line of Czech writing as an inheritance of the Baroque spirit (K. H. Mácha, O. Březina, J. Váchal, J. Deml, V. Holan, B. Reynek a others), it also contains studies on phenomena and trends common to the entire Central European space, such as its multicultural and multilingual nature or the specific transformation of the elements of fin-de-siècle culture and subsequent modernism. In these comparatively based texts Galmiche shows himself as an unconventional researcher in overlooked fields (humorist literature of the 19th century) as well as canonical ones (RKZ), with a special feeling for 'essentialist outsiders'. He views the texts of 'modern classics' in a non-schematic way and offers new contexts for reading them (B. Hrabal, M. Kundera, J. Topol). The last section is devoted to the problems of translation and cultural transfer, primarily in the field of Czech-French relations. The book concludes with an extensive interview with the author by Jiří Pelán.