Čeští dobrovolníci v srbské armádě jako básníci a spisovatelé. Příspěvek k 110. výročí začátku Velké války

The paper is dedicated to the 110th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War, which, as is well known, began with the very unsuccessful attacks of the Austro-Hungarian army on Serbia. The literature of the Czech participants in the Great War is very colourful, both those who wrote about their war journey within the Austrian army and those who, for various reasons, switched to the side of the Triple Entente who fought against their "wider homeland" and returned home, unlike the former, crowned with the glory of heroes. Much has been written about this literature, and it would seem that there is not much more to add. However, something is missing: the introduction of the works of those Czech authors who fought in the Balkans in the Serbian army. Whether from the very first weeks of the Austro-Hungarian aggression on Serbia, or only later, on the Salonika front. There were not as many of them as the writers who fought in the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia. However, only a little more than 3,000 Czechs fought in the Serbian army. Of these, even more than half were those who, although part of the Serbian army, were nevertheless volunteer divisions, built up from Yugoslav and Czech war prisoners in Russia. Of these Czechs, most eventually joined the Czechoslovak legions in Russia in early 1917 anyway. Of course, Czech writers from the Serbian army can hardly be compared with those who described their experiences of the Balkan war from the other, Austro-Hungarian side - with already established writers or journalists such as Egon Ervin Kisch, Stanislav Kostka Neumann, Jaromír John, Rudolf Weiner, Karel Sellner or Jaroslav Křenek. No true “war novel” came out of the pens of Czech soldiers - volunteers in the Serbian army. Perhaps we could call the work of Jeroným Holeček, son of the famous writer Josef, an autobiographical novel, which, however, describes only the post-war stories of former Czech combatants in the Serbian army. Nevertheless, we can highlight some of the memoirs, especially those of Lev Švyhnos (1885-1954) and Melichar Houžvice (1883-1929), who fought in the Serbian army from the first days of the war. The works of both of them are in places of unprecedented artistic quality for this type of literature. In contrast, the work of the first Czech legionary ever, František Kryštof (1891-1960), is merely descriptive. Kryštof, however, was a valued legionary poet in his time, admittedly sometimes overly epic. Only Miloš Wurma (1892-1918) was a truly great poet among the Bohemians on the Salonika front, but this can only be said on the basis of a few surviving poems. The gifted writer fell in the last weeks of the war and most of his literary legacy was irretrievably lost. He was not the only great loss of Czech literature. Summarily, the works of the Czechs from the Serbian army are rather marginal in the vast legionary literature, but they have a firm place in it.