Czech Dreaming

What all did the Czech nation dream of in the past hundred and fifty years?

Sixteen essays from the collection Czech Dreaming are at the beginning of a larger "Czech cycle" in which the author uncovers the historical roots of our present. The reflections deal with the collective dreams of the Czech nation in the 19th and 20th centuries, mainly related to the search for our identity and the place of the Czechs among their Central European neighbours. The stimulating insights into the false ideas, desires and illusions manifested within the Czech basin and the Moravian valleys over the centuries deal, among other things, with the complicated relationship to Slovakia, Russia (and hence the Soviet Union) or Germany, as well as with linguistic, religious or historiographical issues that are relevant to us. As almost always, it was important for Pavel Kosatik to move across disciplines - from history to psychology - to increase the likelihood that the "extra-disciplinary" outcome of his observations would intersect with real life in an engaging and urgent way.

The seminal work of the award-winning columnist and screenwriter took 4th place in the 2010 Lidové noviny Book of the Year poll.

"A book about who we are and who we want to be. Carl Gustav Jung encouraged his clients to write down their dreams and interpret them themselves, because in this way the inner contradictions are unified and thus the mental development takes place. If we take this approach as our own, the historian Pavel Kosatík could help us to be better people, or rather a better society. In his exceptional book Czech Dreaming, as the title suggests, he has collected several dreams of the local society." - Erik Tabery, Respekt

"The book Czech Dreaming is highly recommended for understanding what myths and illusions the Czechs created about themselves in the past, so that they found themselves in the role of colonizers of Africa or masters of a significant part of Germany. Kosatík is able to present them [not only] with inner insight, but also with the necessary amount of distance. What is certainly valuable about his book is how he is able to trace the emergence of a certain idea and its gradual transformations, or, on the contrary, the recurring constants, such as illusions in the creation of idealized images of Russia." - Jan Lukavec, www.czechlit.cz

"The topic of colonies, however, unexpectedly emerged in the Czech environment after the 1918 coup d'état. At a time when the whole world was shaking at its foundations, many Czechs were also experiencing what it was like to suddenly be in control of a foreign territory. Many commanders of the Czechoslovak legions, especially those of the Siberian legions, tried in vain to recover from this dizziness for many years after their return home. It seems that not even T was completely immune to the imperial shalba for a moment. G. Masaryk, when in a letter of July 1918 he confidently confided to the US State Department that 'I am, so to speak, the master of Siberia and half of Russia'. While one was gaining rapidly, the other's control over overseas territories was crumbling. As soon as it became known that among the sanctions applied to the defeated Central Powers would also be the withdrawal of their colonies, more than one latent imperialist on the Czech side grew restless. After all, there were three million square kilometres in Africa alone that did not currently have a master." - excerpt from text