In my paper I focus on different narrative strategies of two epistolary novels: Hanka (1915, 1917) by the Slovene-Croatian writer Zofka Kveder, (1878-1926), who lived before the First World War in Prague, and Jedno dopisivanje. Fragmenti romana (A Correspondence. Fragments of the Novel, 1932) by Julka Chlapec-Đorđević,1 (1882-1969), Serbian author and feminist and ex-“monarchical” author, who lived after the First World War in Prague. She had the possibility to explore the experiences of Serbian women writers. 2

At the beginning of the 20th century, Prague was one of the liveliest cultural cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a rich cultural life and a lot of intercultural connections. It was the centre of Czech modernism and avant-garde, the place where Czech and German (and also Jewish) communities were, despite political conflicts, in a cultural space that communicated with each other. The Slovenian and Croatian writer Zofka Kveder (1878-1926) was a Central European intellectual, balancing between different cultures.3 During her residence in Prague, Kveder explored the lively and rich atmosphere of the city and played a role in its cultural life in cafes (Union) and its student clubs (Slavia). She was a part of the “Habsburg myth”.4

Kveder was born in Ljubljana and spent most of her childhood in the countryside. In 1899 she moved to Trieste and then to Bern and Zürich, lived in Prague from 1900–1906, and then moved to Zagreb. Kveder was known for her cultural hybridity: she changed identities and switched language codes very often. Bilingual from her childhood, she knew Slovene and German, and learned Czech later; half of her literary work is in Croatian and she also translated from other languages into Slovene and German. As a writer and journalist she also associated herself with the Czech women writers and feminists. At the beginning of the 20th century in Prague, the third generation of Czech women writers surfaced: they were also the first self-proclaimed feminists. To use the words of Libuše Heczková – in Czech society it was the time of the birth of gender equality and the New Woman writer and critic as well.5

II

Zofka Kveder constructed her writer and feminist identity in Prague. She was a professional prose writer and a feminist: her opus consists of three novels, several theatre plays and autobiographical short stories (in different collections). Kveder wrote mostly in Slovenian and later in Croatian, and she focused on women from different sections of society. In critical observations of the place of women in the patriarchal society Kveder depicts her different cultural roles. Her work was successfully published in Czech and well known to Czech readers till the outbreak of the First World War. Her real success in Czech culture came after 1906 – after her move to Zagreb. Her work was extensively published in Czech literary sources till the First World War, which was also partly the result of the existence of a common book market across the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was so popular in Czech culture that after the translation of her short stories Vesnické povídky (Village Stories, 1906), fifteen critiques were published.

Agatha Schwartz wrote about the fin de siècle modernity in Austrian and Hungarian part of Monarchy, but we can consider that was characteristic also for other parts of Monarchy:

One major aspect of fin-de-siècle modernity in both constitutional parts of the Monarchy was the presence of a strong and organized women’s movement, as well as a whole new generation of women writers, many of whom were recognized and well established in their time.6

There were specific literary relationships between Zofka Kveder and Czech women writers and intellectuals. Kveder’s relations with Zdenka Hásková (1878-1946) were very fruitful. This poet and writer was her translator and critic. Hásková also introduced Kveder to the literary students’ club Slavia and initiated relationships with her friends – other Czech women writers such as Růžena Svobodová (1868–1920), 7 Helena Malířová (1877–1940) and Marie Majerová (1882–1967). She also had contacts with the Czech feminists. She dedicated her first book of plays Ljubezen (Love), written in Slovene language and published in the year 1902 in Prague,8 to the Czech feminist Marie Woodwářková-Neureutterová.9

After the First World War the historical situation changed, and Czech culture almost forgot about her. Her translator, critic and best friend Zdenka Hásková translated only some of her short stories in the Česká republika magazine.

After 1906 Kveder lived in Zagreb and began to write texts in Croatian language. The epistolary war novel Hanka10 (1915) was the peak of her career in Croatian language. It was a text of an experienced writer (she wrote the novel Njeno življenje (Her life) – her most successful novel in Slovenian literature just one year prior to that).

The novel consists of fictional letters which the first person narrator – the Polish intellectual Hanka – writes to her male friend: Polish historian Staszyński. She begins writing in October 1914 and the correspondence lasts for one year. Not only is Hanka the alter ego of Zofka Kveder but also the other characters and the plot are very autobiographical: Staszyński is a literary portrait of Serbian politician Dimitrij Tucović.11 (In the story she depicts her unconsumed love with Tucović, whom she met in the year 1914 and fell madly in love with. He was killed in the beginning of war.)12

The main theme in the narrative is the construction of the new emancipated woman.

The Polish intellectual Hanka is not happy in her marriage with the pragmatic and rational German, with whom she has two daughters. After she discovers her husband’s infidelity, she leaves him. In the shadow of great historical changes, she settles in Prague. All the time she writes to Staszyński: she remembers the deep friendship she had with the young historian and fellow patriot and their fruitful collaboration; before the war they researched together in the libraries and co-authored a book about Polish history under his guidance. She discovers that she is deeply in love with him. It is the first year of the war, the situation is apocalyptical. She loses her younger brother; he is injured in the battle and dies in her hands in a hospital in Prague. Her mother dies in Zakopane. Hanka moves to Poland and receives the news that Staszyński died in the war.

The style of writing is very expressionistic. The war atmosphere in the beginning of the book is depicted with the biblical motive of the great flood which will destroy the world. Old Europe is dying, it becomes the place where “reason is replaced by foolishness”.13 The War brings suffering, death, chaos and a great move of nations. The main heroine – under the press of historical changes – loses her raison d´être and essential security when confronted with death. Hanka is depressed because of horror and anxiety, so the expressionist scream motive becomes even more noticeable in the distance.14 The narrative reality changes into a dream-like world. Dreams also have a symbolical function in the structure of the plot.15

This roman got Bubanović´s – praise, but afterwards it was accepted very politically in Croatian society: Hanka was interpreted as a symbol of a woman who strongly believed in the Yugoslav idea.16

After Kveder’s tragic end in 1926 Hasková praised her former friend’s work in Czech press with great respect.

III

The first person who wrote a profound study about Kveder´s role in Czech society was Serbian writer and feminist Julka Chlapec-Đorđević (1882–1969), who lived in Prague during the 1920s. Julka Chlapec-Đorđević is known as the first women who completed a PhD in philosophy in the Habsburg monarchy when she was only 24. She married a Czech officer Zdeněk Chlapec. After the First World War they settled with two daughters in Czechoslovakia: first in Pardubice and later (1922) in Prague. She spoke English, German, French, Hungarian and Czech. Chlapec-Đorđević  translated many Czech literary works into Serbian language, had an informal literary and cultural salon in Prague and was an active member of Czech-Yugoslav society. In Serbia she had close contacts with the feminist Ksenija Atanasijević. After the Second World War Chlapec-Đorđević left Prague and, when she died in 1969 in Ústí nad Labem in Czechoslovakia, she was virtually forgotten. Till now nobody researched her role in the Czech culture.17 As Slapšak wrote in 2004, Julka Chlapec-Đorđević is also a “foreigner” in Serbian culture.18

Both Kveder and Chlapec-Đorđević lived for some time in Prague but in different historical situations: Chlapec-Đorđević lived in the democratic first republic of Czechoslovakia, when the era of “monstrous” Habsburg monarchy was over, but not completely forgotten. She inherited the legacy of Zofka Kveder as a writer and a feminist, living in a different (Czech) culture. Similarly to her, she was politically influenced by Tomáš G. Masaryk - also in the case of women rights.19 She published two volumes on feminism in her thirties and many articles in Czech, in Serbian society and also in Slovenia.

As a feminist and an intellectual she was a part of the European feminist movement in the beginning of 20th century, represented by Rosika Rosa Schwimmer and also feminists from Serbia (Vojvodina): Zorka Hovorka and Vladislava Beba Polit. Slapšak wrote in her essay that Chlapec-Đorđević’s feminism was very theoretical, interdisciplinary and analytical.20 She took up subjects like abortion, women’ s identity, the relation to the body and sexuality, sexual ethics, new methods of birth control, women´s rights, the problem of feminism and fascism, feminism and communism, feminism and pacifism.21 In her theoretical remarks she was already using psychoanalysis.

As a feminist, Chlapec-Đorđević criticized Soviet socialism and the role of the women in it as a trap: women in a socialist society should perform the traditional family and sexual role, as well as work and be active in politics. She anticipated the development after the war: the socialist society for her was a shift towards conservativism and decadence of the socialist ideas.

Chlapec-Đorđević also wrote on woman authors and the presentation of women in Yugoslav culture and literature. She visited Serbia in the thirties where she tried to disseminate feminist ideas.

IV

The novel Jedno dopisivanje, Fragmenti romana (A Correspondence, Fragments of the Novel)22 was written in letter form in 1932 a short time after that study.23 Magdalena Koch wrote that this was, after the text Pisma iz Niša o haremima by Jelena Dimitrijević, the first epistolary novel in Serbian literature. 24 When it was first published, the novel was well accepted in Serbia25 and also seventy years after when Svetlana Slapšak wrote a profound study about her work.

In the text Chlapec-Đorđević depicts the secret love affair between a married female writer (Marija Prohaskova) living in Prague and a married doctor (Oton Šrepan) living in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In the narrative plot the influences of Kveder´s novel Hanka is apparent, as well as fragments of Kveder´s biography. The novel is also autobiographical but all the more in context corresponds with the novel Hanka of Zofka Kveder. In one critic statement from 1923 Chlapec-Đorđević wrote that she read this “war” novel and knew it well.26

Jedno dopisivanje is written in letters, as is Kveder´s novel Hanka from 1915. Hanka is living in Prague during the First World War, while Jedno dopisivanje places itself in the new Czech society after the late twenties War. The construction of the main female hero is the same: a middle-age woman intellectual, balancing between different cultures, altruistic, enthusiastic feminist, interested in gender, emancipation, world problems and cultural transfers. We also find similarities in the plot: in both novels the narrator depicts a love affair and the problems of a dysfunctional marriage.

The protagonist of the novel is Marija Prohaskova (the alter ego of J. Chlapec-Đorđević), a feminist intellectual in her forties. A Serbian woman from Vojvodina,27 Marija settles in Prague in the twenties and moves between various cultures. She has a passionate relationship with the doctor Oton Šrepan from Slovenia. Her initial correspondence with him is a letter containing questions about the writer Z.K. (initials of Zofka Kveder).28 We have a metatextual work: Marija is writing a study about Z.K. and she reflects on ideas about writers and writing. In the beginning she writes about the common position of South Slavic women writers in the beginning of 20th century, who were not accepted in a society bounded with prejudices and were stereotypically judged as “saints or dolls”.29 Marija and Oton also correspond regarding Kveder´s best friend Zdenka Hásková, Hásková´s friend Viktor Dyk and Fran Govekar, a writer in Slovenia. The beginning of the novel provides the key, the story mirrors reality: Chlapec-Đorđević after Kveder´s death wanted to write an article (a book?) about her and because of that she joined Czech writer Hasková (friend of Viktor Dyk) and Slovene writer F. Govekar.

The novel is mostly autobiographical, including the aspects of the love affair which could be fictional or real: for example, it depicts the student life of Marija and Oton in Vienna (1906-1912) and the double-secret life of the main heroine in Prague in the twenties. We don´t have any information if she – as a married woman – also had a love affair, but we do recognise her life in Prague in the twenties with children and separated from the husband who worked and lived in Slovakia. In this epistolary novel the love story is prominent, but there are also descriptions of the three different cultural contexts: Prague in the twenties [politics, the role of Yugoslav society there, relationships between Yugoslavs (Serbs) and Czechs]; Ljubljana in the twenties and – in retrospective fragments – life in Vienna before the First World War.

The main focus of the narration is the image of Prague in the late twenties. The heroine, Marija Prohaskova, in essay-style fragments reflects the political and feminist ideas of that time and also the problem confronting feminism. The relationship ends with Oton’s suicide. In both novels the story ends with the death of the male hero.

There are great similarities in narrative strategies, but also differences between two novels. One of the main differences is the construction of the main hero. Hanka is Polish: Kveder chose a fictional national identity. That was a narrative solution which safely emphasised Kveder´s patriotism and ideology of the great “Yugoslav” nation in which she believed in that time. The wish of hers and the goal of Staszyński is a great and unified nation state.

The narrator in the novel Hanka judges the others by their national identity: in that context we find traces of anti-Semitism towards Jews. The intertextual story of Ester from the Old Testament which is incorporated in the beginning of the story is an example of her national ideas: this is the story of a great woman who wanted to save her nation. On the contrary, Marija from the novel Jedno dopisivanje is a person of the world. Her national identity is not so important: she is open and critical to the multicultural world, she accepts and criticizes ideas, not people as members of one nation.

The main theme in both novels is the problem of contrasting the gender identity, the relation to the body and sexuality, to the other sex and the construction of the new sexual ethics. Zofka Kveder in her philosophy follows the belief of new romantics and symbolic writers. Even though Hanka leaves her husband and her children, she is not brave enough to begin life with the new man. Staszyński is for her just an ideal, they never touch and the only not realised kiss shows that the body and carnality are the question of traumas and frustrations. He is the symbol of the unfulfilled love. His image is very much influenced by the ideal of Ivan Cankar in the last symbolist period (he developed the ideal of the symbolic love in the drama Lepa Vida in 1911).30

On the contrary, Chlapec-Đorđević incorporated all her feminist ideas in the novel and we find the essayist passages with the perspective feminist, which was the thematical innovation in the Serbian literature.31 Marija is the prophet of a new life and the position of women in society. She is not afraid of sexuality, neglects formal marriage, even though she feels she is obliged to stay with the husband because of the children. She criticizes Oton, who is more conventional than her and for her is a prisoner of patriarchal conventions and the petite bourgeois society of Ljubljana. Love in the novel Jedno dopisivanje is presented as an equal dialog of both sexes, not a monolog (the case of Hanka!), even though it is clear, that Marija is intellectually sharper than Oton32 and she is also more free from prejudices.

On the other hand the novel Hanka is much more “literal” than Jedno dopisivanje, which is more essayistic, sometimes in the persuasion of ideas more didactical. Zofka Kveder was at the peak of her creation, Hanka is a very modern novel with a distinctive style and very characteristic poetics. The plot is very wide structured, it depicts a complex “intimate and public” life of the main heroine. It also includes a lot of different people and their psychological portraits. There are a lot of nice descriptions of places and special moments in the inner life of her heroes. Kveder is also a master of describing lyrical details, moments, mosaics of lives and fragments of nature. She had already developed a special impressionistic style in her short stories.

Chlapec-Đorđević as a writer is not as complex or as distinguished. She is more traditional: she follows the plot chronologically and she tries to present her ideas. She focuses mostly on the development of two people. In their case she tries to define the category of love, marriage, the relation to children and sexual politics: she tries to define the space between personal and public affairs. Her description of the world is more realistic and documentary: with sharp eyes she depicts the existential crisis of two people in the context of society and different cultures of one period as well.

It is interesting that in the view of modernity the novel Jedno dopisivanje has many more intertextual codes. In the case of Hanka we find just two powerful metaphors from the Bible, in Jedno Dopisivanje we find a lot of literary codes and references: from modern Serbian poetry (Desanka Maksimović), Slovenian literature (Marija cites I. Cankar, O. Župančič and Slovene folk songs), Czech poetry (K. H. Macha, J. Wolker, J. Seifert) modern European literature (H. Ibsen, L. N. Tolstoj). In the text we find references to the painting of Erik Nielson and also references to historical reality in Prague: for example Marija mentions the Slovenian professor Murko at Charles University. The novel could be understood also as a documentary written essay on sexual politics and cultural history. It depicts the new world in the democratic Prague after the First World War, it shows openness in society in a question of sexual life. She writes about the new life of the middle class woman intellectual: following the wave of tourism, congresses, lectures, conferences. There are also the remains of the past Habsburgian multiculturalism and multilingual praxis in the language: in the midst of the Serbian text we find sentences and phrases in (mostly) German, Czech, Slovenian and French.

V

Julka Chlapec-Đorđević was the first intellectual to value Kveder’s work and praised her place in Czech culture and Central European literature for Yugoslav readers. She could also reflect on Kveder´s life because the circumstances within Czech culture in Prague after the First World War were similar to those before it: open, multicultural, intellectually rich and very inspiring. She was an educated feminist, very critical of Kveder in this respect. She wanted to spread Kveder´s reputation in Serbian and Yugoslav culture.

Chlapec-Đorđević was also inspired by Kveder´s work especially by her novel Hanka as is clearly seen in her only novel, Jedno dopisivanje. In her case we find a very inspiring story of the influence of one women writer on another.

In Prague Chlapec-Đorđević followed the path of Zofka Kveder. Following the First World War, she worked for a short period with Kveder in Ženski svijet, a revue published in Zagreb in 1918. Just four years younger than Kveder, she began became a writer very late, already in her forties, after settling in Prague, where she lived from 1922 till 1945. Though it appears they never met each other (as she claimed in her novel), Chlapec-Đorđević was deeply impressed with Kveder’s role and literary work.

Correspondence between Z. Hásková and F. Govekar claims that, after Kveder´s death, Chlapec-Đorđević wanted to write a book about Zofka Kveder.33 Finally, she simply published an article in Serbian concerning Kveder’s role in Czech culture: Iz praških dana Zofke Kvederove (From Prague´s days of Zofka Kveder). It was first published in Letopis Matice Srpske, two years after Kveder´s death in 1928 and republished the book of essays34 in 1935 in Belgrade.35 Chlapec-Đorđević wrote about Kveder’s role in Czech culture and about her life and successful career in Prague, researching her texts and development as a writer. She discovered that the political, intellectual, cultural (feminist) and literary environment in Prague society during the early years of the 20th century “gave the young, self-educated Slovene more stimulation, influence and acceptance than was possible in any other city” and that in Prague Kveder was “surrounded by people with the same ideas, motivation and intellectual openness”.36 When analyzing her literary work, she criticized her feminism, which in her view was only half-committed, theoretical and not sharpened enough.