Czech literature for newcomers

You don't need Czech to read Czech writers. Translators have been busy for a century, and the books are shorter and funnier than their reputation suggests. Three or four of these will help you understand the people around you in a pub or an office faster than any etiquette guide.

Karel Čapek

Čapek (1890 to 1938) was the great Czech essayist, playwright and novelist of the First Republic. His play R.U.R. gave the world the word "robot", though it was his brother Josef who coined it for the play. Karel also wrote journalism, travel books and gentle comic essays, and spoke up for democracy in the 1930s. Start with War with the Newts or the essays.

Jaroslav Hašek

Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished comic novel about a seemingly simple soldier in the First World War, is the best-known Czech novel abroad. Švejk survives the army by agreeing with everything and doing it slightly wrong. The humour is bureaucratic, which is why Czechs still quote it.

Bohumil Hrabal

Hrabal (1914 to 1997) wrote long, rolling sentences about ordinary people in odd situations, with tenderness and a taste for the absurd. Closely Watched Trains was filmed by Jiří Menzel (see Czech cinema history). For a first Hrabal, try I Served the King of England.

Milan Kundera

Kundera (1929 to 2023) wrote The Joke in Czechoslovakia and later emigrated to France. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, set around the Prague Spring and its aftermath, is probably the Czech novel most foreigners have heard of. You may quarrel with the philosophy, but the setting is hard to forget. Read it with our guide to the Prague Spring open.

Václav Havel

Havel was a playwright and dissident before he became president. His absurdist plays, such as The Garden Party, satirise bureaucracy and language. His essay The Power of the Powerless is a short, clear account of how ordinary people keep an unfree system going by going along with it. For his political role, see the Velvet Revolution explained.

Božena Němcová

Němcová's The Grandmother (Babička, 1855) is a gentle portrait of rural life that Czechs read at school. It isn't a page-turner, but it explains a good deal about the national self-image: modest, rural, neighbourly. Think of it as background.

Jaroslav Seifert

The poet Jaroslav Seifert won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1984. His poems are lyrical and tied to Prague. Translations are fewer than for the novelists, so look for a bilingual edition.

Ivan Klíma and Jáchym Topol

Klíma wrote about life under communism and the moral choices it forced, in novels and essays. Topol, a younger writer, is known for energetic, rough-edged prose about Czechia after 1989. Both are available in English, though the selection varies.

And Kafka

Franz Kafka wrote in German and lived in Prague, and Czech readers claim him with a mix of pride and caution. He has his own guide: Franz Kafka in Prague.

Finding the books

Czech bookshops stock translations, and public libraries lend them. Prague has several English-language bookshops; none is named here because stock and owners change. Second-hand shops are good for older translations, but check that the edition is complete, since some old ones are abridged.

Where to start

Take one comic book and one serious one: Hašek or Čapek for humour, Kundera or Havel for politics. Read the first chapters of Švejk and you'll spot the character in every office.

Do this today

Pick a title, check your local library or an English-language bookshop in Prague, and read the first chapter on the tram.