VCHLICKÝ, Jaroslav. — Pseudonym of Emil Frida, the most famous Czech poet, born at Louny on 17 Feb. 1853, died at Domažlice on 9 Sept. 1912. His activity as a translator from the most varied literatures made him the typical exponent of cosmopolitanism in Bohemia; yet in this untiring activity and this prodigious aptitude some saw a sign of limited creative power.
A youthful sojourn in Italy exercised a great influence on the poet. The Italian landscape is the subject of the collection of poems Un anno nel Mezzogiorno. Of his vast poetic output some lyrics, full of nostalgia and musicality, remain alive to this day. Much of his work, however, bears the stamp of the tastes of the period. V. did not wish to confine himself to being a lyric poet: he wished indeed to confront the great problems of thought, life, and death, in a certain way following in the footsteps of Victor Hugo; he oscillates — on the poetic plane and on the speculative one — between a bitter pessimism (from which there sometimes springs authentic poetry) and a vague optimism regarding the future destinies of humanity, characteristic of the positivist era. In 1893 he obtained the chair of Italian literature, translated the Divina Commedia, the Vita Nuova, the Gerusalemme liberata, the Orlando Furioso, Parini, Leopardi, and Carducci (for whom he had a particular poetic and spiritual sympathy).
He also translated extensively from French, English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese literatures. He was a dramatist and literary critic (among other things, he wrote an extensive study on Leopardi). Lacking a definitive aesthetic orientation, uncertain and oscillating in his ideologies, V. nevertheless sometimes had happy intuitions. His cosmopolitanism helped to free Czech culture from German predominance. A son of an age dominated by superficial progressivism, he did not penetrate deeply into the medieval revival nor fully grasp the values of modern symbolic poetry, which interested him.