Old Czech studies of Vaclav Cerny

The posthumous re-edition of Staroceska milostna lyrika [Early Czech courtl y love lyric] (first published in 1948), expanded with the studies Staroces ky Mastickar [The Quacksalver: An early Czech play] (1955) and Od bonifantu k mastickarum [From the bons enfants to the quacksalvers] (1962), brings t ogether, with the anthology Labutje divny ptak...[The Swan is a queer bird] (from Vaclav Cerny's papers), almost all Cerny's contributions to what we know about early Czech literature. When Cerny expanded the monograph Staroc eska milostna lyrika a second time (though it was not published during his lifetime), he left his theses unchanged. Early Czech courtly love lyric, he believed, developed from folksongs, which were influenced in the thirteent h century by early Minnesang and, through it, by an earlier stage of Trouba dour verse. In the fourteenth century it was influenced by French literatur e, this time directly; this is manifested in what is know as Zavisova pisen [Song of Zavis], which is connected with the Italian dolce stil nuovo. Sch olars raised serious objections to this thesis (early Minnesang, they argue d, could not have affected Bohemia at all; most of the preserved texts of e arly Czech courtly love lyric correspond to the song type which in Germany in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries moves from the Minnesa ng to the popular song;Zadisova pisen is not connected with the dolce stil nuovo, but is a variation on the model of Heinrich Frauenlob.) In his studi es on Mastickar, Cerny argued that it was a secular farce that had slipped into a liturgical play on the three Marys and he denied its seriousness (Pa vel Trost, followed by Roman Jakobson, by contrast, defended the view that Mastickar was written as an organic part of Passion plays from the heathen ritual drama on death and vernal resurrection). Labutje divny ptak, the sel ection of Czech secular verse from the Gothic period, constitutes a popular izing counterpart to the author's scholarly work. Cerny considered early Cz ech literature to be the place where decisions were taken on the cultural o rientation of the nation; his work on medieval literature not only sheds li ght on scholarly questions but is also a contribution to the so-called 'phi losophy of Czech history'.