Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/14

 Bohemian words, sometimes where an English equivalent is wanting, sometimes, in order to give an idea of the character of the original language, which also means the character of the people who speak it. The stories ave been twice revised. Once by a learned Bohemian Jew in Prague, to whom I read them aloud and who was kind enough to appreciate them in their English dress. “They are written from the heart to the heart”, he said. And again a second time by an English literary man to whom the sentiment of the stories was so obnoxious that he put his pen through about one third part of them. Most of his excisions I have rejected. In spite of these revisions I cannot hope to have avoided many errors of translation which I hope may be corrected by the critical reader, nor can I expect a wide circle of English readers. The stories appeal to a civilization developing on different lines from our own, and, although they are a true picture of Slavonic life and sentiment, they will no doubt often appear to English readers fantastic and overstrained. It may be worth noticing, in passing, that Poldik, the name of a character in one of the stories, is the diminutive of Leopold, and that of Bartos, in another of them, stands for Bartholomew.

He who can read between the lines will perceive in both these stories ingenious political allegories. These I will leave him to discover for himself, premising that in both the main idea is the maintenance of the Bohemian nationality against the encroachments of the centralizing Austrian power. The last story is based on a strange institution in the rural districts of Bohemia—that of vejminkar. In the case of small freehold estates or farms held on a long lease, the owner, as his sons grow up, pensions himself off; or, to put it differently, retires upon a settlement from the active management of the estate, in order that the eldest, youngest, or favourite son may marry and have the enjoyment of it. The pathetic fate of the village Lear in this story is an eloquent exposition of the abuses of the system which exists to this day in some parts of Bohemia.

I began this preface by pointing out what an immense portion of the globe forms the nidus of Slavonic civilization, and as many people have very indefinite ideas about Slavism and its languages, it may not be amiss to conclude with a few remarks upon the Czech or Bohemian language and its relation to other Slavonic dialects. As I do not profess to be a learned man, I have extracted the little I have to say on the subject from Mikes’s Russo-Czech grammar.

The Slavonian nation, he writes, now contains eighty million souls, and is divided by its position into Southern, Eastern, and Western.

I.—In Eastern Slavonic we find

(1) The Cyrillian or Ancient Slavonic, used, like the Latin, but very much modified, as the language of the Church, by Russians, Serbians, Bulgarians, and part of the Dalmatians;