Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/15

 and, although they are a true picture of Sclavonic 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, 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 favorite 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 Sclavonic civilization, and as many people have very indefinite ideas about Slavism and its languages, it may not he amiss to conclude with a few remarks upon the Czech or Bohemian language and its relation to other Sclavonic 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 Sclavonian nation, he writes, now contains eighty million souls, and is divided by its position into Southern, Eastern, and Western. I. In Eastern Sclavonia we find

(a) Great Russian spoken by thirty-five million people.

(b) Little Russian spoken by thirteen million people. And