Table of Contents

Introduction Peter Bugge, Aarhus University Preface Caryl Emerson, Princeton University Where Is My Home Mystification and the Nation Dream of Europe Prague The Center The Bridge Michurin The Potato Bug The Spartakiad The Metro The Death of the Leader Minus-Stalin Symbol With a Human Face Renaming The Celts Within Us

About the Author

Vladimír Macura (1945-1999) was a Czech writer, translator, and semiotician. Hana Píchová is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera. Craig Cravens is Fellow of Czech Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Culture and Customs of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Reviews

"Macura is not defined by his nation; rather, in these essays, he defines his nation. He does so with an ironic twinkle in his sharp eye, all the while catching what others missed seeing or, more often still hoped would be overlooked."--Paulina Bren, Bohemia

"The Macura revered by Czech intellectuals for his irreverent take on their culture's sacred cows is very much in evidence in this selection of his essays."--Michael Henry Heim, University of California, Los Angeles

"Hana Píchová and Craig Cravens have done Czech studies a great service in carefully translating and judiciously annotating this volume. . . . Most of Macura's essays strike the reader in a particular way: as if you've had the good fortune to show up in the middle of a rather interesting but much broader discussion, the beginning of which and the end of which, it seems, you also won't be around for. This peculiarity intrigues much more than it frustrates, and in the contemporary field of Czech studies, there is something to it."--David S. Danaher, Slavic and East European Journal

"While the essays in this volume are rather brief, they always present food for thought. Sometimes brilliant and often funny, they should be read, and not only by experts."--European History Quarterly