Lumír is a weekly literary magazine that was established in 1851 by Ferdinand Břetislav Mikovec. It was the focal point of the neo-romantic nationalist poet Jaroslav Vrchlický and his Ossianic followers.[1][2] Lumír is the name of a bard in Czech legend.

The first issue of Lumír 1851

The magazine's followers were known by the same name as the magazine. The writers and artists involved started a new direction in Czech culture. Previously culture was seen as coming from Germans and sources in German. German poets like Heinrich Heine were translated poem by poem from German to Czech. With the emergence of the Lumir group, writers like Vrchlický, Viktor Dyk and Julius Zeyer the focus turned towards Latin roots and the Anglo Saxon countries in particular. This cultural focus is said to have led other Czech intellectuals to also look in the same direction for scientific, economic and social ideas.[3]

References

edit
  1. ^ Paul Selver, An Anthology of Czechoslovak Literature, 1929, p.15: "The rallying-point of Vrchlicky and his followers was the Lumir, a literary periodical which was founded in the ... Celtic, Spanish, and Oriental legends, from the Charlemagne cycle, and from the early history of his native country."
  2. ^ Arne Novák & William Edward Harkins, Czech literature , 1976: "These artistic leanings revealed the Lumir adherents as Neo-Romantics. Their enthusiasm for "restoring old paintings" was Romantic; Romantic was their ambition to integrate epic fragments into a unified "legend of an era;" Romantic was ..."
  3. ^ Krejčí ; [translation, Martin C.Styan], Oskar (2005). Geopolitics of the Central European region : the view from Prague and Bratislava (1st ed.). Bratislava: VEDA, Pub. House of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. p. 308. ISBN 8022408522.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)