Treasures of Czech literature

At first, it might seem like a little thing; nonetheless, for us students of the social sciences, statistics can be rather demanding. It is ironic, presumably we’d prefer letters to numbers, but the truth is the more letters there are, the more we have to think about what they represent. So on one cold Thursday morning we had to deal with something most of us (including me) haven’t seen since high school days.

Fortunately, the exam did not take long and after an hour I could go back to my favourite hobby – books. As impossible as this might seem, I have found yet another library in the second term I was previously unaware of. And a very special one, as it is a Slavonic library, which to my surprise has a whole floor of Czech books. Initially, I assumed it would have books for students learning Czech as a foreign language, yet the opposite is true. The library is filled with the best of Czech literature from Havel to Otcenasek. Any book your high school Czech teacher ever told you about is here. The biggest treasures however are in my opinion Jirecek’s History of Literature from 1875 or Dobrovsky’s correspondence from 1885. Of course I took a couple of books with me to my dorm room, where I was enjoying reading the 1911 edition of Slezské Písně. Yet, soon enough the books were returned and exchanged for others, more related to my course (although who can say Bezruc is not related!), and i dived into yet another essay...