Familiarity seen from a distance. Evžen Boček's novel series about the return of an aristocrat

Abstract

In the Czech cultural space, the egalitarization of social life, typical of European modernization processes, overlaps with a different discourse, according to which the nobility, most of all faithful to monarchy and ancestral tradition, is sometimes perceived as a foreign or even hostile element for the “healthy growth of the nation”. Later, both interwar and communist projects of national identity, only deepened this negative image of the native nobility, imposing and confirming the conviction about the destructive role of aristocracy in national history. The idea of  making the subject of a literary presentation the issue of the restitution of aristocratic estates, treated in terms of historical justice, might seem risky. Despite of this published by Evžen Boček in 2012  humorous novel Poslední aristokratka, the plot of which follows the adventures of the Czech-American family of Kostka‘s trying to bring the recovered, Moravian baroque palace to its former glory, turned out to be an unprecedented commercial success. A series of text sequels was also very popular with readers: Aristokratka ve varu (2013), Aristokratka na koni (2016), Aristokratka a vlna zločinnosti na zámku Kostka (2018) and Aristokratka u královského dvora (2020).