The Czech Manuscripts: Forgery, Translation, and National Myth

By David L. Cooper

The Czech Manuscripts is dedicated to one of the most important literary forgeries on the model of Macpherson's Ossianic poetry. The Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts, discovered in 1817 and 1818, went on to play an outsized role in the Czech National Revival, functioning as founding texts of the national mythology and serving as sacred works in the long period when they were considered genuine.

A successful literary forgery tells a lot about what a culture wants and needs at a particular moment. One fascinating aspect of this story is how a successful fake was able to function in an integral way as part of the Czech cultural revival of the nineteenth century, both because it played to expectations and nationalist values and because it met real cultural needs in many ways better than genuine historical literary works and artefacts. Also fascinating is the vainglorious Václav Hanka, a prolific and dedicated forger who was likely the center of the conspiratorial ring that created the manuscripts and who went on as the librarian of the Czech National Museum to alter a number of others.

David Cooper analyzes what made the Manuscripts a convincing imitation of their Serbian and Russian models. He looks at how translation shaped their composition and at the benefit ofexamining them as pseudotranslations, and investigates the quasi-religious rituals and commemorative practices that developed around them. The Czech Manuscripts brings the Czech experience into the broader developments of European history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501771941

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Cover: The Czech Manuscripts, FORGERY, TRANSLATION, AND NATIONAL MYTH by David L. Cooper

THE CZECH MANUSCRIPTS

FORGERY, TRANSLATION, AND NATIONAL MYTH

DAVID L. COOPER

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

AN IMPRINT OF

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

To my parents, who have always been the genuine article.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Chronology

Introduction

1. Forgery as a Romantic Form of Authorship

2. Successful Forgeries

3. Translation, Pseudotranslation, and the Manuscripts

4. Faith, Ritual, and the Manuscripts

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book took a whole lot of time and a little bit of money. I would like to thank the sources that freed up that time and provided the funds, in larger and smaller amounts. The University of Illinois Campus Research Board enabled initial research on this project in spring 2012 with travel funding and Humanities Released Time, and the research was generously supported by a grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Title VIII National Research Competition. Annual university humanities/arts scholarship support funding kept the work humming from year to year, and a recent semester teaching release and semester-long sabbatical in fall 2021 enabled the completion of the manuscript. A generous Faculty Fellowship from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) enabled a yearlong project to conduct some digital textual analysis to round out the study.

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as "Padělky jako romantická forma autorství: Rukopisy královédvorský a zelenohorský ze srovnávací perspektivy," Česká literatura 60, no. 1 (2012): 26–44. Many thanks to the editors for permission to reprint here.

Many colleagues have supported, encouraged, and contributed to this book over the years. My biggest debt is to Dalibor Dobiáš and Michal Charypar, along with members of the nineteenth-century group and others at the Institute for Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, in Prague, who answered my questions, assisted with publications, and always made me welcome: Michal Fránek, Martin Hrdina, Iva Krejčová, Václav Petrbok, Kateřina Piorecká, Petr Plecháč, and Michael Wögerbauer. Dalibor Dobiáš offered valuable advice and suggestions for chapters 1 and 4 in particular and translated my work for publications in Czech. Michal Charypar gave invaluable support in related projects. My thanks to the librarians of the Institute for Czech Literature’s library, where I spent many pleasant and fruitful hours in 2012 and 2015. My fantastic colleagues at UIUC inspire me, support me, and generally make working there very rewarding. Thanks to Eugene Avrutin, Felix Cowan, Maureen Marshall, Harriet Murav, John Randolph, and Daria Semenova for important opportunities, comments, and questions. Nadia Hoppe assisted in gathering critical resources as my research assistant. Thanks also to Laura Davies Brenier, Michael Finke, George Gasyna, Roman Ivashkiv, Lilya Kaganovsky, Richard Tempest, Peter Wright, Donna Buchanan, Zsuzsa Gille, Jessica Greenberg, Joe Lenkart, Olga Maslova, Judith Pintar, Valleri Robinson, Kristin Romberg, Dmitry Tartakovsky, and Maria Todorova. In the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic, fall and winter of 2020–21, my digital project team of Michal Ondřejček and Demetry Ogoltsev were the best working and social group imaginable, keeping me sane and productive. Among the colleagues who have offered me the opportunity to give lectures or have heard and commented on my work at conferences and supported it, I would like to thank Jindřich Toman, William Nickell, Hana Waisserová, Dirk Uffelmann, Tetyana Dzyadevych, Olena Betlii, Masako Fidler, Jonathan Bolton, Christopher Harwood, Yuliya Ilchuk, and Angelina Ilieva, along with many more here unnamed.

Many thanks to Andrew Drozd and a second, anonymous reviewer for the press for very helpful comments and suggestions for revision that have made this book better and hopefully more appealing to a broader audience. Special thanks to Amy Farranto of the University of Northern Illinois Press for believing in the project, and to her colleagues there and at Cornell University Press, Ellen Labbate, Karen Laun, Alfredo Gutierrez Rios, Michelle Scott, Jane Lichty, and the entire team for turning the manuscript into a lovely book.

Last here, but first in order of importance, I want to thank my family. The pandemic, for all its real inconveniences, alienations, and tragedies, also had a small upside for our family as the rush of school and work activities came to a sudden halt and we suddenly began to quietly enjoy each other’s company again. I could ask for no better companions in life. My daughters, Nika and Lana, inspire me and make me proud. And my dear wife, Valeria, is not only my closest friend but also a dedicated colleague and constant support in work and in life, and I cannot imagine doing any of this without her.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

For notes, bibliographic entries, and titles in the text I employ a simplified Library of Congress transliteration for Cyrillic and Greek text. Names in the text are also transliterated using this system, but Russian names with more established English forms, like Zhukovsky or Gilferding, are given in those standard forms. For quotations and examples in the text, I have departed from this usual system and instead employed the scholarly or scientific transliteration system for Russian Cyrillic, for two reasons: (1) this system is closer to Czech and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) Latin orthography and makes the parallels and borrowings between the languages far more visible in the examples, and (2) this also makes the examples more legible to Czech scholars.

CHRONOLOGY

Highlights and Lowlights in the Life of the Manuscripts

Introduction

The Phenomenon of the Manuscripts

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the Czech national movement was entering into a new phase. The few small circles of nationally minded Czech patriots embraced a program for the revival of the Czech language and, consequently, the Czech nation and gradually began to actively recruit new members to the national cause. The program had been outlined by Josef Jungmann (1773–1847) in 1806 in a pair of programmatic dialogues, On the Czech Language.¹ Jungmann saw language as the primary sign reflecting national cultural identity. Language was a great warehouse of all the arts and human knowledge … [and] the most superb philosophy, adapted to the particular geographic latitude, mores, ways of thinking, inclinations, and the thousands of distinctions of each nation.² Unfortunately, for over a century the Czech language had fallen into disuse as a language of culture, due to the particular linguistic politics of the Counter-Reformation in the Czech lands. As a result, Czech was no longer really a language of higher culture and higher learning, unlike German and French. For Jungmann, it was contradictory for Czechs to become educated, to attain to higher culture, in German or French, because the Czech language was essential to their own cultural identity. By his logic, it was imperative for any speaker of Czech to pursue the cultivation of the Czech language and to pursue their own cultivation in Czech.

Cultivating the Czech language as a means for the reestablishment of Czech culture meant, above all else, writing in Czech in all artistic and learned genres. This was implicitly a program for the creation of a simulacrum, the invention of cultured discourse in Czech for an elite Czech-speaking audience that did not yet exist. It was explicitly aimed at winning Czechs away from the use of German, the language of education in the Czech lands, as a culture language, creating a Czech discourse that could match the refined German poetic idiom and German as a language of scholarship, both products of the renaissance of German culture that had occurred in the recent decades. Practically, the program pursued the development of a distinct Czech idiom for high literary genres and the creation of technical vocabulary for scholarship and the sciences by means of translation of foreign works and the borrowing of vocabulary from other Slavic languages. Jungmann himself showed the way in his many poetic and scholarly translations, including a translation of Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, published in 1811, that borrowed extensively from Polish and Russian to fill perceived gaps in Czech poetic vocabulary.³

Václav Hanka (1791–1861), like his friends Josef Linda and Václav Svoboda, was a typical member of the generation of Jungmann’s followers. When Hanka came to Prague to begin his studies at the university in 1809, he soon joined a group of fellow students who participated in a kind of friendly literary society in which they read works in Czech, made small translations from foreign works into Czech, and composed their own verse in Czech, proclaiming it at their meetings and engaging in mutual critique, activities entirely in line with Jungmann’s program. He quickly became a leader among these nationally conscious students, whose activities expanded to include public lectures and amateur theater presentations.⁴ But poetry was the leading literary genre of the day, and it was in the creation of a distinct language for poetry that so many new Czech patriots engaged to express their nationalist sentiments and ambitions. The turn from writing verse in German to writing in Czech was a frequent sign of the successful recruitment of a new member of the national community, like Matěj Polák, a talented poet who published his first verses in Czech in 1813 and took the markedly Czech patriotic name Milota Zdirad Polák as an additional sign of his belonging to the Czech community. The students could also attend the lectures on Czech language and literature at the university by professor Jan Nejedlý, but Hanka and some others wanted more. In 1813, Hanka and Linda joined the private seminar on Slavistics taught by Josef Dobrovský (1853–1829), who was the leading expert at the time on Slavic antiquities and Slavic philology. Hanka impressed Dobrovský quickly with his knowledge of Slavic languages (he had picked up some Serbian in his youth from soldiers camped in his hometown) and soon became his favorite student, for Hanka studied Slavistics with more enthusiasm and success than in his university studies of law.⁵

Dobrovský was interested in the discovery and publication of older Czech literary works and had a particular interest in finding genuinely old folk songs. From 1807 to 1811, he had been in correspondence with the Grimm brothers regarding the late twelfth-century Old East Slavic myth-epic Slovo o polku Igoreve (Igor tale). The Grimms and other German researchers were actively collecting examples of European epic poetry as foundational works for how they were reconceiving the histories of European national literatures, and in 1811 Jacob Grimm inquired if the Slavs might not have some material to compare to the Islandic Edda songs. Dobrovský replied that there may have been such material in the manuscript that contained the Igor Tale (a speculation that looks highly unlikely now), but that it had not been published, and instead offered a new translation of the Igor Tale into German by one of his students.⁶ This is but one inquiry among what was likely very many, but as Dobrovský and others searched the Czech archives, they failed to find the kind of old mythic and epic poetic works that were most in demand.

In addition to what he may have learned from Dobrovský, Hanka got another lesson in the vital interest in old folk poetry from the success of his acquaintance and peer Vuk Karadžić. Hanka went to Vienna to continue his studies of law at the university there in December 1813, remaining for a year. While there, he continued to pursue his interest in Slavistics with Dobrovský’s Slovenian correspondent, Jernej Kopitar, who was assisting and encouraging Karadžić with his new Serbian grammar and first publication of folk songs, the Mala prostonarodnja slaveno-serbska pesnarica (Little Slavo-Serbian folk songbook, 1814).⁷ Hanka welcomed the volume in a small anonymous review article in the Vienna Czech periodical Prvotiny pěkných umění (First-fruits of the fine arts), to which he had become a regular contributor, concluding the review with a translation into Czech of a song.⁸ Karadžić’s songs, particularly following his second publication in 1815, would soon take Europe by storm. That collection included traditional epic songs that treated a foundational moment in Serbian national history, the late fourteenth-century Battle of Kosovo. For the Czechs’ own current battle to win hearts and minds over to Czech poetry from German, Karadžić showed that the insurmountable difficulty of competing with the national idols Schiller and Goethe on the field of contemporary poetry could be avoided and that even German minds could be captivated by older Slavic epic and folk poetry.

On returning to Prague, Hanka took his place as a recognized leader in the young patriotic circles, which included appreciation for his talents as a poet. He conducted lectures in Czech language for his peers at the university starting in 1816, until forbidden in 1817.⁹ He published his own collections of original songs (1815, 1816), which were folk song imitations, many the product of hidden translations or adaptations of published Russian folk songs, and published a volume of translations from Karadžić’s songs in 1817.

And then, in September 1817, Hanka made what seemed to be the most momentous discovery. While visiting his home region in eastern Bohemia, he uncovered a small manuscript in Old Czech in the vault of the church tower in Dvůr Králové. He wrote to Dobrovský the following day announcing his discovery and giving details of its age and contents: a fragment containing the oldest Czech poems yet discovered, perhaps from the twelfth century, mostly on military matters and infused with a truly Homeric spirit.¹⁰ Dobrovský, suspecting nothing, welcomed the manuscript and considered it the finest example of Old Czech poetry. But just over a year later, another manuscript appeared that aroused Dobrovský’s suspicions of Hanka and his roommate Linda, though it came without any apparent connection to the two. Instead, it was sent anonymously to the highest official in the Bohemian Kingdom as a donation to the newly formed National Museum, where Dobrovský served on the board. It contained a poem in epic form whose theme was a legendary tale from the founding of the first Czech ruling dynasty and with orthography and linguistic forms that suggested it was a few centuries older than even Hanka’s remarkable find. Dobrovský blocked the museum from adding it to its collections and privately suggested that he knew its authors, his students Hanka and Linda, along with Jungmann.

But the second manuscript was promoted by others, particularly by Jungmann and his brother Antonín, which eventually forced Dobrovský to publicly declare it a fraud in 1824. Svoboda was the only one brave (or foolish) enough to openly engage Dobrovský in polemics and defend his friends from the implicit charge of forgery and the old Czechs from the explicit charge that they were not culturally developed enough in the late ninth century to produce such a manuscript and the advanced forms of statehood it reflected. The controversy over the second manuscript did not yet touch Hanka’s initial discovery, which he published in late 1818 and which was welcomed by domestic and foreign experts. The controversy was one of several that divided Dobrovský as a respected Czech leader from the younger generation and its nationalist pursuits, and the dispute lingered past the death of Dobrovský in 1829, with many younger nationalists determined to see the second manuscript absolved of his charges. Finally, in 1840, after many years of promising, František Palacký, author of the first history of the Czech nation, along with Pavel Josef Šafařík, the new leading expert in Slavistics, published an expert defense that responded to Dobrovský’s criticisms point by point, enabling Czech nationalist patriots to finally embrace the second manuscript fully along with Hanka’s discovery. The manuscripts grew in significance and reputation along with the Czech national movement in the decades to come.

The Manuscripts Phenomenon

The Czech forged manuscripts were one of the longest-lived romantic literary forgeries. They have been called the most important Macphersonian (or Ossianic) forgery.¹¹ Nearly seventy years passed between their discovery and the definitive demonstrations of their falsehood, but their success was not just in fooling the experts for so long. They were, simply put, the biggest phenomenon in Czech letters for much of the nineteenth century, winning the acknowledgment and admiration of foreign scholars and poets, at a time when modern Czech literature was in its infancy, and providing inspiration and essential material for the development of Czech national culture across all the arts. Translations and partial translations were made into over a dozen languages by midcentury, including versions of songs by Goethe and commentary by Jacob Grimm.

The manuscripts—imitations of medieval folk epic and lyric poetry depicting the ancient Czechs successfully defending their homeland from alien invaders and thus also defending their native religion and their peaceful, democratic cultural values—played an outsize role in the Czech Revival, modeling Czech poetic practice and patriotic behavior and winning converts to the Czech national cause. It would be no exaggeration to say that one cannot imagine the Czech National Revival, as it is traditionally termed—that is, the reestablishment of Czech as a language of high culture and the articulation and mass adoption of a program of Czech national culture and politics—without the manuscripts. That is