its conventions, rather than a Czechness defined and recognized by its administrative and political borders. Čapek’s idea of “world literature,” and the way he articulates it through travel writing – focusing on the aesthetic rather than the political aspect – is what makes his travel opus distinctive to interwar Central European travel writing. Similar to the First Czechoslovak Republic, debates around national and cultural identity, as well as one’s position in relation to and within the imagined European identity, also took place in other successor countries of what once was Austria‑Hungary. Diana Georgescu’s remark about the Romanian interwar perception of Europe, that “far from receding to the background, the idea of Europe was still invoked in interwar travel accounts as an ideal image against which Romanian intellectuals measure both their peripheral society and the West itself” (Georgescu 294) could to a certain extent be applied to other Central European societies. In general, many writers who left travel accounts, such as Hungarian Dezső Kosztolányi (1885–1936), Polish Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) and Croatian Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981), articulated their cultural belonging at the edges or in the mythologized space of yet another unknown “Europe.” These writers acknowledge a discord regarding the intellectual advancement of their own culture and imagined – or real – Western European ideals. In 1914, four years before the dissolution of Austria‑Hungary, Kosztolányi noticed a change in the use of a French word “autrichien” – an Austrian – which had been used as an ethnically neutralizing common denominator for all of the country’s nationals. While the name had to an extent provided Austrians with a “respectable identity abroad” (Kosztolányi 232), now, in 1914, because of the looming Great War, “those calling themselves ‘autrichien’ were almost worse off than the Hungarians” (232). However, the geographical, cultural, and historical position of Hungary remained a grey area for Western Europeans “In the Central Congo… Almost next door to Australia… On the romantic peaks of the Danube” (232). For Miroslav Krleža, Croatian fate remains on the periphery of European culture. In his analogy Croatia represents the end of the Southern Railway, one of the main rail routes of Austria‑Hungary whose original role had been to connect imperial Vienna with Trieste as the main seaport of the monarchy. Yet his discourse becomes a metaphor for a one ‑way journey to the periphery of Europe: “we are all living in a provincial Introduction: Karel Čapek’s Travels and the Idea of Traveling
19