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"Cockades and shouting, flags upon flags. The heart takes wing and away".¹ Thus the poet Viktor Dyk, describing, in his Song on the Night of October 29, the birthday of the Czechoslovak Republic, a state so ancient in one way and so new in another. Ancient, in that its western part coincided with a country that had existed within much the same geographical boundaries from the end of the first millennium ad under the name of the Lands of the Crown of St Wenceslas. New, because its eastern part had — again for a thousand years — formed a single whole with the territory of the Hungarian Crown of St Stephen, the portion inhabited, however, by a Slav people, the Slovaks. The Austro-Hungarian polarity of the Habsburg Empire was thus in a sense preserved and continued by the Czech-Slovak polarity of the New Republic. But Viktor Dyk was not to be deceived by the cockades, the shouting and the flags, and his next line runs anxiously: "Hark to the cry from the poet's throat: our fight is only beginning!"

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10644-8_16

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