Jakub Arbes was a well-known Czech writer who died in 1914 and is known as the creator of a specific sort of short novel, called the romaneto. His work, however, is written in a language which is not completely understandable to the contemporary reader. Between the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century the Czech literary language changed rapidly and significantly in its morphology (e.g. the forms of noun cases), syntax (e.g. the structure of the passive), the lexicon (the meanings of many words and the styles ascribed to them), as well as word order rules. Supposedly, the classical literary Czech language changed much more substantially than did English, French or German during this period of time. But the reception of the classic Czech literature in the public and among literary historians has not followed this evolution of language as far as the classical Czech literary canon is concerned. Contrary to evident facts, most of the public and the literary historians have resisted the need to translate this outdated system of Czech into the new system of our time. The inevitable result will be the relegation of this literature to the status of museum piece. This article is a first step on the path to a new reception of this outdated Czech literary language.
The aim of this article is to present a relatively complex linguistic analysis of the three-volume correspondence between Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich (V+W). Focusing on the dialogic structure of these letters, its remarkable coherence and stylistic uniformity, we examine the research possibilities such text types may offer in the field of dialogue stylistics. This highly private correspondence draws attention to the transitions between written and spoken language, fluctuations between using literary and common Czech, as well as a frequent use of vulgarisms, which we interpret as a natural part of the authors’ shared idiolect. Another building block in the stylistic uniformity of the entire correspondence that is worth highlighting is the linguistic playfulness and languagebased humor, including V+W’s fondness for using, manipulating, and commenting on specific set phrases, in which they also intertwine Czech and English. Although English holds a prominent position both in terms of frequency of use and the variety of expressions, the letters actually display features of multi-lingual texts; this quality comes out also in the form of stating the authors’ opinions about Czech (or other languages). The multi-lingual flavor is not far from issues of intertextuality, which manifests itself in the form of a variety of quotations, paraphrases, references, or ad-hoc created fake proverbs. Another part of our analysis concerns V+W’s creativity in word-formation (especially on the part of Voskovec), as well as various grammatical phenomena. In morphology, the texts show a conspicuously high frequency of participles and the archaic short-form adjectives; in syntax, we observe the stylistic function of certain passive constructions, causativization of non-causative verbs, special kinds of ellipsis, and idiosyncratic patterning in marking information structure.