"The beautiful landscape of battlefields, cemeteries and ruins" – Central European nostalgia in Jaroslav Rudiš novel "Winterberg’s last journey"

Abstract

In Czech identity discourse, Central European themes return repea- tedly, partly to create its own ”imagined tradition,” and partly to contribute to the debate on the danger of losing belonging to the Occidental zone of European culture, which, as Milan Kundera so emphatically demonstrated, affected all ”small nations” subjected to the influence of the Soviet empire. However, the space of Central Europe, mostly located in the ”imperial-royal” past, is not often seen in Czech literature through the prism of longing for the ”good old days.” Jaroslav Rudiš’s novel Winterbergova poslední cesta (”Winterberg’s Last Journey”), published in 2021, joins this discussion, exposing the specific balance of losses or rather historical and existential catastrophes caused by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The journey undertaken by the almost hundred-year-old title character at the end of his life, who, equipped with an antiquarian guidebook, travels through Central European regions in order to get to know the places described in the Baedeker, ultimately turns into a testimony to the disappearance of a world that was once of unquestionable and irreplaceable value to many of its inhabitants.