Střet Karla Havlíčka s Josefem Kajetánem Tylem o Posledního Čecha jako spor o českou veřejnost

The paper analyses the critique of Josef Kajetán Tyl's novel Poslední Čech (The Last Czech, 1844), which was published in 1845 by the emerging critic Karel Havlíček. The critical attack was not exclusively motivated personally, more importantly it was an attempt to become more visible and break with the older, sentimental patriotism of Czech literary canon. The paper argues that it is also representative of the Central European transformation of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit). The paper shows that in the cultural nationalism of the time literary criticism fulfilled increasingly important mediating role between the growing national capital of art and other European centres of artistic innovation (Pascale Casanova). Havlíček's critical performance is viewed as a part of a broader effort to dominate the field of criticism, of which Tyl was a prominent protagonist, and make it an independent bourgeois institution. Therefore, the contexts of the conflict are not only sought for in Czech-language journals, but also in German-language media. This is facilitated by the relatively wide acclaim that Tyl's Poslední Čech received before and after Havlíček (Ost und West, Oesterreichische Blätter für Literatur und Kunst, Die Grenzboten etc.).