choslovakia, which experienced postwar Soviet occupation. The personal sexual dilemma of Milos is a metaphor for Czechoslovakia's impotent war behavior, and the World War II Nazis are a metaphor for the Cold War Communists--as if the filmmaker is satirically noting that the Czechs, for all their cultural pretensions, were no match for committed political juggernauts, fascist or communist. As comments, the film shows "interplay between history at a personal level with the larger historical framework" (COT 3).
Even so, Sayer asserts that the Czech identity has found expression in art. It is the source of the famous 10th-century legend of Good King Wenceslas, of the ill-fated religious reforler Jan Hus, and of the early 20th century playwright Karel Capek. It has figured so prominently in art history (especially since the success of Puccini's opera La BohFme in 1896) that the international lexicon back-formed a neologism: To be a bohemian is to be an artist (or anyway would-be artist) with a distinct identity who lives rather in the crossroads between the cultural mainstream and the demimonde. The resoluteness with which the Czech identity has been preserved despite its minor geopolitical status can be seen in the multiplicity of cultural artifacts from the region. Sayer characterizes the "dictionaries, grammars, folk songs, almanacs, operas, ethnographies . . . poets, professors, and playwrights" that came out of Bohemia in the late 19th century as "an arcane set of weapons and a somewhat unlikely corps of revolutionaries" (CB 81). He also positions Czech artists in the influential vanguard of experimentation in the 19th and 20th centuries--from the familiar advertising/poster art of Mucha to the abstract expressionism of Gutfreund and Josef Capek and the dissonant, sometimes opaque, but absorbing literary art of Kafka (CB 159; 188; 207f; 250).
In the contemporary period, the novels and criticism of Milan Kundera have functioned as ...