A Gothic Soul

A Gothic Soul is the most acclaimed work of Czech Decadent prose. Expressing concerns that are unique to the Czech movement while alluding creatively and ironically to Joris-Karl Huysman's Against Nature, the novella is set in Prague, which is portrayed as a dead city, a city peopled by shades, who, like the protagonist -- a nihilist and the "last scion of a noble line" -- are only a dim reflection of the city's medieval splendor. He lives in a dreamworld, navigating the labyrinth of his soul, which gives rise to visions. In his quest for meaning, he walks the city, often hallucinating, while pondering questions of religious fervor and loss of faith, the vanity of life, his own sense of social alienation, human identity and its relationship to a "nation," the miserable situation of the Czechs under Habsburg rule, and Prague's loss of its soul on the cusp of modernity as old sections, such as much of the squalid Jewish Quarter, are demolished to make way for gaudy new buildings and streets. With a history of madness running in his family and afraid the same fate awaits him, he ultimately retreats into the seclusion of a monastic existence as the epitome of unity and wholeness and a way out of the morass of present-day fragmentation. Yet Karásek eschews the mawkish, opting instead for darker tones that play with the tropes and motifs of Decadence while conflating the same-sex desires of his protagonist, the fatalism and futility of such an existence within the social construct of the day, with concerns for the dual fates of his nation and city.

Jiří Karásek was born on January 24, 1871, in the Smíchov district of Prague. A poet, critic, writer of short stories and novels, he was perhaps the leading representative of Czech Decadence. In 1894, Karásek co-founded Moderní revue, which became the leading organ for Czech Decadence, also publishing books and introducing in Czech translation the work of French Symbolists and Decadents. Karásek died on March 5, 1951, in Prague, and his collection of modern art, one of the most extensive in Europe, was "nationalized" and is now housed in Czech museums.