Karel Hynek Mácha

Karel Hynek Mácha (1810-1836) was a Czech Romantic poet and writer, often regarded as the founder of modern Czech poetry. He wrote in Czech at a time when the language was being revived as a literary medium within the Austrian Empire, and his name is tied above all to one long poem that reshaped the direction of Czech letters.

He was born in Prague, in the Malá Strana district, into a modest family. At secondary school he first wrote verse in German, and at nineteen he exchanged his birth name Ignatz for the Czech form Hynek, a choice that hints at where his loyalties were heading. He studied law at Charles University but was more drawn to philosophy and to the circle around the linguist Josef Jungmann and the playwright Josef Kajetán Tyl, where he began writing in Czech. A restless traveller in search of picturesque landscapes, he visited Venice and Florence in 1834. That same year he met Eleonora Somková, with whom he had a son and whom he later agreed to marry. After moving to Litoměřice to prepare for his legal exams and work, he died there at the age of twenty-five. The exact cause of his death is unknown; pneumonia and cholera have both been suggested.

His best-known work, Máj (May), appeared in April 1836 in a small print run that he paid for himself. Contemporaries found it confusing and insufficiently patriotic, and it was only in the middle of the century that a new generation of writers, the so-called May School, took it up as a banner. It is now considered a classic of Czech literature and has been translated into many languages. His prose, including the autobiographical sketches and the novel Gypsies, is read far less, yet its melancholy and sense of isolation anticipate concerns that later literature would take up.