VRCHLICKÝ, JAROSLAV. - Pseudonym of Emil Frida, the most famous Czech poet, b. at Louny on 17 Feb. 1853, d. at Domazlice on 9 Sept. 1912. His activity as a translator from the most varied literatures made him the typical exponent of cosmopolitanism in Bohemia: but in this tireless activity and in this prodigious aptitude some also wished to see a sign of limited creative power.
A youthful stay in Italy exerted a great influence on the poet. The collection of poems Un anno nel Mezzogiorno is dedicated to the Italian landscape. Of his vast poetic activity, certain lyrics full of nostalgia and musicality remain alive to this day. A great part of his production nevertheless reflects the tastes of the age. V. did not wish to limit himself to being a lyric poet: he wished in fact to confront the greatest problems of thought, of life and of death, in a certain sense retracing the footsteps of Victor Hugo; he oscillates - on the poetic plane and on the speculative one - between a bitter pessimism (from which an authentic poetry sometimes springs) and a vague optimism, regarding the future destinies of humanity, characteristic of the age of positivism. 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 a great deal from French, English, German, Spanish and Portuguese literatures. He was a playwright 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. has nevertheless sometimes happy intuitions. His cosmopolitanism helped to free Bohemian culture from Germanic predominance. A son of an age dominated by a superficial progressivism, he did not penetrate deeply into the spirit of the Middle Ages and did not fully understand even the values of the modern symbolist poetry that interested him.
Bibliography
Wolf Giusti