Books published by Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic

Springtide A chaffinch in a tree of cherry sings merrily spring's introit. Its blazing bobble dwells in leaves, alive, and swells > The flowers are flares of white. The chaffinch has gone quiet > My eyes close on the day: an orb revolves in grey > Poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek spent most of his life in the relative obscurity of the Czech-Moravian Highlands; although he suffered at the hands of the Communist regime, he cannot be numbered among the dissident poets of Eastern Europe who won acclaim for their political poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, Reynek belongs to an older pastoral-devotional tradition--a kindred spirit to the likes of English-language poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, and Edward Thomas. The Well at Morning presents a selection of poems from across his life and is illustrated with twenty-five of his own color etchings. Also featuring three essays by leading scholars that place Reynek's life and work alongside those of his better-known peers, this book presents a noted Czech artist to the wider world, reshaping and amplifying our understanding of modern European poetry.

CZ;SK

CZ;SK

CZ;SK

CZ;SK

This publication, written by Czech professor of art history Jan Royt, renders a vivid image of the capital of the Bohemian Kingdom in the High Gothic period in the broader historical context of the circumstances that were particularly favourable for Prague during Charles IV's reign (1347-1378). For the first time in history, after Charles's coronation as the Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, the capital of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown was simultaneously the metropolis of the Holy Roman Empire. Thanks to the royal and imperial care, which in addition to Charles' monarchical post in Europe also reflected his Western-European education and cosmopolitan openness as well as his belief in and respect for the Premyslid tradition, Prague flourished, becoming a unique and beautiful city. The cathedral, the stone bridge, the university and construction of the New Town and its churches laid out in a magical cross pattern, remain today as the "stone seals" on the face of Prague's Gothic architecture, endorsed by the paintings, sculpture and the entire realm of spiritual culture. The book contains around 100 photographs of Prague monuments, sights and documentary images.

Written in the years 1954-57 and treating events from the Stalinist era of Czechoslovakia's postwar Communist regime, Midway upon the Journey of Our Life flew in the face of the reigning aesthetic of socialist realism, an anti-heroic novella informed by the literary theory of Viktor Shklovsky and constructed from episodes and lyrical sketches of the author and his neighbors' everyday life in industrial north Bohemia, set against a backdrop of historical and cultural upheaval. Jedlicka, like many if not most intellectuals of his generation, was a member of the Communist Party when it came to power in February 1948, but by fall he had resigned, and shortly after, as a result, he was expelled from his studies in ethnography and esthetics at Charles University in Prague. In 1952 he and his wife had a son, and when she was offered a position as a doctor in the border town of Litvinov in 1953, the family moved. Jedlicka worked odd jobs as a laborer and tutor, with occasional freelance assignments for radio, TV and magazines, while writing Midway at night. The title of the book comes from the opening line of Inferno from Dante's Divine Comedy. For Jedlicka, Litvinov was hell. Meditative and speculative reflections here alternate and overlap with fragmentary accounts of Jedlicka's own biography and slices of the lives of the people around him, typically rendered as overheard conversations. The narrative passages range in chronology from May 1945 to the early '50s, with sporadic leaps back and forth as the "characters" go about the business of "building a new society" and the mythology that goes with it. Jedlicka and his family were residents of the Koldum (Collective House), a grandiose socialist architectural project of communal living that fails in ways comic and tragicomic alike. Jedlicka doesn't neglect to portray the era's most momentous events, including the February 25, 1948, speech by Czechoslovakia's first Communist president, Klement Gottwald, on Prague's Old Town Square, which readers of Kundera will recognize from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and which Jedlicka witnessed firsthand. But while Kundera was concerned with the grand sweep of history, Jedlicka zeroes in on more personal and quotidian features of the new order. Due to its critical view of socialist society, Jedlicka was not able to publish Midway until 1966, after the easing of cultural control. Even then, however, parts of the book were censored, and the complete version did not appear until 1994.

For the ancient Romans, lamps were more than just a way to be able to see in the dark - they were mythical muses, witnesses to secrets, and instruments of the supernatural. This catalog brings together 210 ancient lamps excavated since 1949 in Bratislava-Rusovce. It deals with lighting devices of the Roman Empire.

An English translation that captures Vladislav Vancura's experimental style - or, as the author himself called it, "poetism in prose." It is presented alongside the original illustrations and typography and goes a long way toward deepening our understanding of the Czech spirit, humor, and way of life.

The Czech king and Roman Emperor Charles IV met with the French king Charles V in Paris in 1378. Reconstructing the journey to this meeting with deft narrative talent, the author traces the king's progress from Prague to Paris, piecing together a modern chronicle from contemporary French scholarship and medieval literature.

A key personality in Czech modern art, Jan Koblasa works in diverse media. Filled with color reproductions of selected monotypes, lithographs, woodblock prints, screen prints, and computer graphics from the mid-twentieth century to the present, this book also includes an artist's time-line, updated to 2012, and a list of his works in collections.

The National Gallery in Prague has in its collection a unique Japanese illustrated manuscript of ogi no soshi, a genre of waka poems illustrated in fan-shaped pictures, which blossomed from the late Muromachi to the early Edo period. This is a facsimile of this ancient illustrated manuscript of waka poetry.