Czech-Moravian Treasury: Czech Calendars of the 19th and the First Half of the 20th Century

The summer panel exhibition presents Czech calendars from the collections of the Moravian Library.

Calendars are a unique testament to literary life, which, however, remained on the fringes of interest for a long time. Nevertheless, they were the most widespread publications that modeled the development of society and simultaneously allow us to reconstruct and understand it retrospectively. If at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries they carried Enlightenment ideas and became a tool for educating broad layers of society, in the 19th century, especially during Bach's absolutism, they were one of the few printed materials that served to spread patriotic ideas or as an irreplaceable source of livelihood for Czech-speaking authors – which is why the 19th century is considered the golden age of this genre. When Karel Čapek focused on it at the beginning of the 20th century as one of the margins of national literature, he found it already in decline, yet he published a fascinated testimony about it as a norm-setting genre that influenced not only the views and expectations of popular (reading) layers in relation to literature but also pre-negotiated the functioning of social mechanisms, evidenced the stratification of society, its atomization, and the efforts for its unification. Similarly, it allows us to perceive the era-specific understanding of time, which, in contrast to the dynamically changing modern society, was based on the need for continuity and thus certainty. The calendar is therefore an anthropological genre, a testimony to man as a social being.