“The mother and sister of beautiful literature,” Maksim Gorky called the folktale. Yet to a nation such as the Czechs–a nation that has survived centuries of oppression–the folktale has often been more.

The schoolteacher settles down to spend his eerie, all-night watch over the body of his deceased benefactor.

Like the folktales of every people, the stories and anecdotes of the Czechs were the literature of the illiterate. Folktales functioned as cautionary fables, as repositories of folk wisdom and accepted morality. But what was this wisdom and morality? The Czechs made fun of their masters and tyrants by demonstrating that powers both earthly and hellish could be outsmarted and overcome; they celebrated folk heroes, those strong and simple people who overcome dragons, kings, and sorcerers. In these stories, goodness seldom wins out without a good dose of wiliness.

In one tale, the protagonist, who acquired various magical devices during his youth, is now old. He manages to fool the devil and thus evades hell. But perhaps more telling, he later pulls a fast one on Saint Peter and sneaks into heaven. Remember that this is a country where Protestantism was brutally suppressed at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War; where the Catholic Church was often the handmaiden of the Austrian ruling class.

During the almost three hundred years of Austrian occupation, vernacular literature preserved the Czech language at a time when most “serious” literature was written in German. In Bohemia, the nineteenth century saw a tremendous surge in interest in all aspects of the folk vocabulary.