PREFACE
I am indebted to Mr Otto Pick for my introduction to and information concerning Czech literature as represented by the Short Story. He has endeavoured wholeheartedly and for many years to carry the interest in Czech literature beyond the confines of his own country, and to make Central and Western Europe, and the countries beyond the seas, realize the resurrection of a language which had been considered doomed for literary expression.
Indeed, for two centuries, the Czech language had been practically dead and buried. Bohemia suffered perhaps more severely than any other country in the Thirty Years’ War, and after their defeat in the battle of the White Mountain in 1621, the Czech nation as such disappeared from European history. The country became an appendage of Austria; the Czech language was repressed. It subsisted in a rudimentary
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