On 27 February 2024, the first-ever Day of Folk Costume was held in the lower house of the Czech parliament. Initiated by three politicians from the parties ANO and TOP 09, it opened with an exhibition of folk costumes recreated from historical models. The event was reprised a year later as ‘The Day of Folk Costumes and Regions in the Chamber of Deputies’, under the patronage of the Speaker, Markéta Pekarová Adamová (TOP 09). This time there was also a parade and folklore festival complete with choral singing and regional gastronomy.
The first iteration of the festival was announced while I was writing my thesis on folklore in contemporary literature and society. I watched in amazement at real life providing a continuous stream of evidence for the return of folklore into culture and society, and not just in Moravia, the part of the country traditionally associated with folklore. Once on the periphery, folklore has now reached the centre and – paradoxical as it may sound – has begun to take root in Czechia’s globalised capital.
A reservoir of folklore
From a theoretical perspective, the explanation would seem obvious: in times of crisis, society goes in search of traditions that best match its perceived identity. Folklore is usually understood as being synonymous with tradition and to be the ‘most autochthonous’ element inherited from earlier times.
Folklore thus serves as the foundational myth of our society. In the nineteenth century, Romantics and champions of the National Revival helped to fashion this myth not only through the collection of folk songs and the forging of ancient manuscripts, but also by creating their own variations on the themes and motifs found in folklore.
It is the last of these approaches that links our own time to the era that saw the birth of the concept of folklore. Of course, literature is free to borrow from any source it chooses, albeit within limits that change with time. Nowadays these are defined primarily by ethical considerations.
As the philosopher and anthropologist Joseph Grim Feinberg points out, the postcolonial turn brought a turn towards folklore, opening the doors to voices and traditions that had long been silenced. The orientalising distinction between, on the one hand, ‘folklore’ or ‘folk art’ as part of the European tradition, and ‘indigenous art’ as the cultural product of non-European nations and ethnic groups on the other, has become blurred. As a result, folklore has become an umbrella term for various types of folk art, often the kind that is hand-made.
A changing discourse
The continuity of discourse on folklore in the Czech context has been covered by several publications. They include the collective work, ‘The weight and weightlessness of folklore: The folklore revival movement of the second half of the 20th century in the Czech lands’ (2021), edited by the expert folklorist and historian Daniela Stavělová. The introduction contextualises developments since 1989, when post-communist dissident discourse referred to folklore as practised under communism as a ‘escapist’ and ‘a pretence’. This perspective was rejected only in the 2010s, a change the authors believe was connected to the outcome of the 2013 and 2017 parliamentary elections (won, respectively, by the Czech Social Democratic Party, ČSSD, and Andrej Babiš’s party ANO), as well to the ‘revisionist’ turn in historical studies.
Instead of being perceived as an act of ‘collaboration’, folklore now started to be regarded as ‘intangible cultural heritage’, as defined in the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage adopted by UNESCO in 2003. The UNESCO list includes such traditional items or pursuits as fujara, the Slovak overtone flute; European resist printing known as indigo dyeing (Blaudruck/Modrotisk/Kékfestés/Modrotlač); Czech and Slovak puppetry, and the Ride of the Kings, a tradition still maintained in the Moravian region of Slovácko.
In the case of Slovakia, a good introduction to the subject is provided by Feinberg’s foreword to the Slovak translation of his book The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia (2018), an ethnographic and philosophical investigation of folk dancing in Košice in the 2010s. Feinberg puts his research in the contemporary political context – the book was published three years after the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, an event he associates with the radicalisation of a part of Slovak society and the rise of a new wave of nationalism, which in 2016 carried a neofascist party – Marián Kotleba’s The People’s Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS) – into parliament for the first time.
In his collection of essays ‘Post-peasants: Slovakia’s folk protest’, the Slovak anthropologist Juraj Buzalka seeks the source of this radicalisation in the legacy of village mentality, which he believes still forms the core of Slovak society and culture. In his view, ‘post-peasants’ are characterised by their opposition to globalisation and the distrust of elites, which helps to nurture populist movements. The sociologist Dominik Želinský challenges such an understanding, arguing that the present state of Slovak politics has been brought about by power relations and the media, and cannot be reduced to simplistic formulae and stereotypes. Nevertheless, a conservative understanding of folklore remains the basis of Slovakia’s identity.
The ‘Last Goddess’ effect
In the first decade of this millennium, folklore began to move closer to the centre of social and cultural attention, also in Czech literature. As opposed to a strong regional current in contemporary Slovak literature, the authors of a series of publications mapping contemporary Czech literature since the 1990s present do not regard the regional aspect or the dichotomy of city and village as particularly important. Nor do they view the ‘village novel’ (a term applied primarily to the writing of Jiří Hájíček) through the prism of folklore. Instead, they see the main trajectories of recent Czech literature as converging on memory and the past.
Nevertheless, the folklore perspective can prove fruitful when discussing certain prose works written since 2010, since it opens a door to the comparison of different national literatures – not just in Central Europe but also, for example, the contemporary hispanophone folk-horror feminist movement. It also enables us to approach a particular national literature from a new angle and discover unexpected literary relationships between disparate authors. Both Kateřina Tučková and Olga Tokarczuk, for example, can be seen as building on the work of the nineteenth-century Czech writer Božena Němcová.
The folklore perspective also points to the gendered nature of the trend in literature. Many novels by women writers feature protagonists who take up handicrafts as a way of shaping their feminine identity. An explanation can be found in feminist theories that foreground the silencing of women and their systematic exclusion from dominant discourses, as advanced by scholars such as Mary Beard and Magdalena Szczuka. Here folklore serves as a useful alternative source. The treasure trove of folk storytelling is widely accessible, and its rules have been gradually loosening, but unlike myths that are universal, folklore is rooted locally.
One of the bestselling books of the 2010s was Kateřina Tučková’s novel Žitkovské bohyně (The Last Goddess, English translation 2012). It is set in the region of Moravské Kopanice on the Czech and Slovak borderland, traditionally visited by people seeking treatment from local goddesses. Unlike in Šeptuchy (‘Whisperers’, 2019) by the Slovak Alena Sabuchová, Tučková’s goddesses are frozen in their historic representation, which the protagonist, or perhaps the author herself, has found in archives. The book ends in tragedy, signalling the end of a tradition gradually overcome by successive regimes in cahoots with the patriarchy.
Tučková is right to warn women about the evil of the world, but the same cannot be said of her framing of lesbian relationships as pathological, or of her exoticisation of Slovakia. Nevertheless, she shares with Slovak women authors a (pseudo)ethnographic framework similar to that common in nineteenth-century Czech literature by women writers such as Božena Němcová and Karolina Světlá.
The protagonist of Anna Bolavá’s 2015 novel Do tmy (‘Into darkness’) is a translator and herb-gatherer who succumbs to an illness driven by her obsessive gathering. As in Tučková’s novel, the conclusion does not augur a bright future for womankind – its motifs of invisibility and infertility suggest rather the opposite, similarly to the motif of disappearing in Klára Vlasáková’s Těla (‘Bodies’, 2023).
The second part of Bolavá’s trilogy, Ke dnu (‘Down to the bottom’, 2017), depicts social life in a provincial town; in the concluding part, Po potopě (‘After the deluge’, 2020), the mythologising framework reaches its apex in the figure of the father, who is a water goblin. Bolavá is one of only few contemporary Czech authors who has succeeded in embedding folklore traditions in our post-modern world while forging a distinctive language and poetics.
Whisperers, embroidery and drag
The folkloristic trend of the 2010s in Slovak literature culminated in books longlisted in 2019 for the Anasoft Litera prize, the country’s main literary award. On the shortlist, Katarína Kucbelová’s Čepiec (The Bonnet, English translation 2024) went head-to-head with the winner, Alena Sabuchová’s Šeptuchy (‘Whisperers’), while the longlist included Svätyne (‘Sanctuaries’), a novel by Dominika Madro. Although critics lumped them into a single current, labelled ethnographic-mythical or folklore-magical, the poetics of these three authors differ radically.
In her first work of prose, the poet Katarína Kucbelová embarked on an auto-ethnographic exploration of art, blending her and her grandmother’s story with the life of an elderly villager in the Lower Tatras, to whom she turned to learn the art of embroidering bonnets, a part of the traditional folk costume. Kucbelová openly depicts her distrust of contemporary folklore and is just as frank in revealing her sense of uprootedness and desire to put down roots. She succeeds in this endeavour while highlighting the gender continuity these traditions involve. Her narrator does not mind leaving her bonnet unfinished: her work will be completed by someone else, perhaps her daughter or a descendant.
Although Sabuchová also conducted ethnographic research on the Polish-Belarussian border, she took a different approach. While recording the precise time and location, illustrated by photographs, the story she tells is fictitious. Her protagonist returns to places where she grew up, where she encounters spirits of the dead, including that of her best friend. Through the characters of female (and in one case male) folk healers, Sabuchová explores the theme of specifically female loneliness as experienced by widows, unmarried female teachers, or simply women without a partner. Her female characters create new rituals that challenge both the patriarchy and the church.
Dominika Madro’s Sanctuaries, the most lyrical of these three books, is the ballad-like story of a woman whose relationship ends tragically against the fog-bound backdrop of a hamlet in Myjava, a region in western Slovakia. Madro’s poetics is similar to that of 1940s lyrical fiction, a genre of Slovak literature made famous by authors such as František Švantner and Margita Figuli. Madro, like Bolavá, Vlasáková and Zuzana Říhová, also deals with the subject of infertility. The pessimistic conclusion of her book is akin to the endings of novels by these Czech women writers.
While folklore is not absent from novels by contemporary male authors, they do not use it as a framework for examining their masculine identity. For example, Maroš Krajňak’s Stalker-like trilogy, which opened with the novel Carpathia (2015), focuses on the cultural memory of the Ruthenian community on the verge of extinction. Lukáš Luk explored regional or Slovak identity in his humorous trilogy set on the river Váh. Slovak-born Miroslav Hlaučo, the author of the novel Letnice (2023, Pentecost), the 2015 winner of the major Czech literary award, Magnesia Litera, resorts to standard gender stereotypes, including a love triangle.
Elements of folklore also feature in works of literary reportage, for instance Slon na Zemplíne (‘The elephant in Zemplín’, 2018) by Andrej Bán, although he is primarily interested in Slovak identity. Also worth mentioning is Matěj Hořava’s Pálenka (‘Distilled spirits’, 2014), a book whose lyrical and nostalgic style is akin to that of Carpathia. It would be hard to find elements of folklore and myth in the world of Hájíček’s village novels and their protagonists in pursuit of ‘genealogical research’.
By contrast, Slovak writer and musician Jakub Spevák draws on biblical imagery in the exploration of the village environment, and explicitly references folklore in the autobiographical work Všetko, čo som ti nestihol povedať (‘Everything I never managed to tell you’, 2025). Addressing his deceased father, the novel also covers the intersection of drag and folklore, the latter becoming an instrument for grasping his own queer identity, in an approach similar to the female writers mentioned earlier.
Obsession and community
So which aspects and forms of culture are highlighted by contemporary literature – particularly that written by women? For some, like Katarína Kucbelová in The Bonnet, folklore represents a bonding element that creates continuity. For others it represents a community, its rituals helping to bind us all together, as in the case of the lonely widows in the cemetery in The Whisperers.
The term folklore is sometimes used in the plural in the sense of human archetypes being passed on, as in the short story collection Dom pre jeleňa (‘The deer house’, 2022) by Dominika Moravčíková, as well as in her debut poetry collection Deti Hamelnu (2020, The Children of Hameln). In Anna Bolavá’s trilogy, set in the fictitious town of Řečovice, folklore is linked with obsession and is unable to survive in the new neoliberal order. Kateřina Tučková’s The Last Goddess presents the dying out of folklore as a human and, particularly women’s, tragedy.
The literary techniques employed by these women writers to embed their themes in the framework of folklore intersect with those typical of the authorial myth, as defined by the literary historian Blanka Činátlová: they include the depiction of pre-modern traditional society, the cyclical nature of time against the backdrop of History with capital H, and the cathartic function passed down through traditional myths.
Since these women authors draw more on folklore than myth, a more apposite term to describe their work might be authorial folklore, something that is also found in other forms of art. That is certainly true of music – an element of Czech folk music has evolved into a new folklore redolent of the city as well as of the woods. In experimental projects such as Spievanky (2024, Ditties) by the Czech-Slovak free-folk duo Púčik, folklore is also used in an ironic reappropriation of tradition, in this case, to frame the experience of trans people.
New folk bands and songwriters, such as Severní nástupiště (‘Northern Platform’), DOHOR (‘To the Mountains’), Cardo Decumanus and Člověk krve (‘The Man of Blood’) do not shy away from the theatrical pathos whose revival has been observed in literature, particularly poetry. A good example is the writing of Tereza Šustková and her collection Koutnice (2024), which carries a Christian message but also the poetics of pain, reminiscent of the novels of Madro, Bolavá and Říhová.
Like these authors, Klára Krásenská gravitates in her poetry to the village, Christian spirituality and nature-inspired lyrical poetry. Both Šustková and Krásenská show an affinity with cottagecore aesthetics, as reflected in the latter’s instagram account (@klara.krsnsk). In Slovak poetry similar tendencies can be observed in the work of Dominika Moravčíková, as well as in that of Jela Abasová, who writes quasi-mythological poetry as well as haikus. She alternates between more epic poetry featuring fairytale characters such as Všeded (‘Allgrandfather’) and Strombaba (‘Treewoman’) and short scenes of village life. And Patrícia Gabrišová’s debut poetry collection features folklore motives connected to water, such as mermaids.
Two forms of folklore
Gendering is much less pronounced in poetry. Although the themes vary (with maternity remaining key for women poets), male poets also frequently draw on folklore in their work. Miloš Doležal, who uses a quote from Erben’s The Bouquet as an epigraph for his collection Jana bude brzy sbírat lipový květ (‘Jana will soon gather linden blossoms’, 2022), associates women with herb-gathering, as does Bolavá. By making Job the lyrical subject of his poems, Doležal directly challenges God about his hard lot and the loss of his beloved wife.
Vojtěch Štěpán’s poetry also features spirituality closely linked to myth, while Petr Šmíd’s poems draw on various forms of folklore, as he populates his texts with invented folklore-like beings such as Oškrda Haštal or Paškrt Smolinka and invents new nursery rhymes and proverbs. He presents several varieties of country ranging from ‘a country of absorption’, which he believes never to have existed, through a ‘country of work’ which no longer exists, to a ‘comedic country’ still surviving in a few remaining relics.
Authorial folklore is therefore a form of individualisation and marketing ploy under an author’s brand (the only option today). But it also enriches literature with new types of poetics, first seen in Czech literature in The Last Goddess, later in the Řečkovice trilogy, Pentecost and, most recently, thrillers by Petra Klabouchová. This trend is even more pronounced in Slovak literature, where this mythic-ethnographic movement (or simply, folkloristic literature, if we choose to refer to it that way) now represents a key direction.
Joseph Grim Feinberg distinguishes between two kinds of new folklore-related art: the ‘tragic’ variety, typical of the post-Communist period; and a later, alternative or utopian, ‘radically historic’ variety. Tragic folklore is a fitting term for works by many Czech women writers mentioned in this article. A considerable proportion of recent writing, however, is the product of the new, ‘radically historic’, folklore, which pushes playfully against the established hierarchies from below, regardless of any pageantry staged in parliament.
This translation has been supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
