Jiří Karásek (ze Lvovic) Decadence flourished in the Czech lands more than anywhere else in central and eastern Europe under the auspices of the decadent journal The Modern Revue (Moderní revue), founded in October 1894 by Arnošt Procházka and Jiří Karásek on the model of the leading French decadent-symbolist journal Mercure de France and journals edited by Anatole Baju, particularly Le Décadent. The movement’s themes of despair, impotence, and frustration found especial resonance among the Czechs, who had been striving in vain for decades to gain greater rights within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Procházka and Karásek edited The Modern Revue, the most significant and widely known Czech modernist journal, until Procházka’s death in 1925. The two writers headed the decadent movement, with Procházka writing chiefly manifestos, reviews, and theoretical and polemical essays promoting the new movement, and Karásek publishing decadent poetry, drama, and prose as well as non-fictional works, including criticism, polemics, and theoretical essays. Karásek continued to devote himself to decadent themes through the 1920s, well after the movement had expired elsewhere. He was by far the most prolific Czech decadent writer, and by many accounts, the best. Karásek (later known by the pseudonym Karásek ze Lvovic) was born on January 24, 1871, into a poor family in Prague. He was fascinated by death and decay from a young age, and these decadent themes naturally became integral to his fiction. Several of his siblings died in childhood, and in his memoirs he writes that he used to go to their graves in the Lesser Town Cemetery and communicate with their souls. His father also died suddenly in 1890. He completed high school and began to study theology at Charles University in Prague, but soon dropped out, doubting his vocation as a Catholic priest. He then decided to become a teacher, but lacked the financial resources necessary to complete the requisite studies. Regretting that he could not devote himself entirely to literature, in 1892 he became a civil servant in the postal services. In 1896 he was promoted to Imperial and Royal postal assistant, and in 1921 he became the director of the Postal Museum and Archives, retiring in 1933. Thus Karásek, like T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, worked full-time in a professional clerical position while devoting all of his free time to literature. While lack of resources and the consequent inability to become a full-time writer or at least work in a more fulfilling capacity were frustrating, the sense of despair that is so prevalent in Karásek’s fiction stemmed in large part from his homosexuality. He experienced same-sex desire in a society that did not accept it and enforced laws against homosexual acts. Karásek felt obliged to keep his feelings to himself until he courageously published the first openly homoerotic poetry in his 1895 collection Sodom, in connection with his journal’s courageous defense of Oscar Wilde, who was then on trial for homosexual acts. Sodom was confiscated and destroyed by the authorities. Karásek himself faced police investigation, but was not charged with any crime. Karásek’s later trilogy, Novels of Three Magi (1907, 1908, 1925), features erudite homosexual characters steeped in the occult sciences, inspired by stories of magic and alchemy surrounding Rudolf II, Czech King and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Karásek also became one of the first political defenders of homosexuality in the early twentieth century.
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