V hradbách – Téver Felix (2010)

The writer Anna Lauermannová-Mikschová, who writes under the pseudonym Felix Téver (also known for her literary salon at Jungmann Square), drew from her knowledge of the Prague environment in her literary work, which she viewed somewhat differently than was customary in Czech literature. It was not the Prague of small tradespeople and "little people," as her contemporary Ignát Herman wrote about them; it was the bourgeois Prague, the Prague of families flirting with the life of the nobility, where national sentiment was often overshadowed by a sense of belonging to the monarchy. The novel In the Walls from 1924 vividly depicts characters trapped "in the walls" of conventions, prejudices, and their own limitations in late 19th-century Prague. They are snobbish burghers glancing at the nobility, an officer who ruthlessly drains his family, a mother raised in a convent obsessed with the need to elevate her family back to nobility, which they lost by marrying a non-noble, as well as members of the newly wealthy bourgeoisie and the emerging patriotic intelligentsia. The chronicler's style in which the author describes the realities of everyday life for these classes is quite unique in our literature, infused with romanticizing plots that, however, do not lead to a clearly happy ending but culminate...