The Olomouc literary scholar and historian František Všetička (1932) has consistently focused, among other things, on the development of Czech prose in the first six decades of the 20th century (e.g., in the volumes Ariadne's Ark, Possibilities of Meletus, Steps of Calliope, etc.). In his book of studies on compositional poetics, Rázovité refugium, he now focuses on selected prose works of the 19th century. Although this is the author's first step into this epoch of Czech literature's development, as he intends to map the entirety of the compositional poetics of Czech fiction in the 19th century, the collection of essays dealing with the prose of Karel Hynek Mácha, Karel Sabina, Karolína Světlá, Jan Neruda, Jakub Arbes, Alois Jirásek, Svatopluk Čech, Julius Zeyer, and others provides a panoramic and coherent view of 19th-century prose, which František Všetička approaches primarily from the perspective of its compositional construction and structure. The book is supplemented by an extensive Dictionary of Compositional Poetics with references to specific literary works created during the mentioned historical period.
