Inultus

For my Czech Literature course at uni, one of the works that we read was a rather interesting and surreal work by the decadent writer Julius Zeyer. It was called “Inultus”, which means “unavenged” or “unpunished” in Latin and is the first story in his collection Three Legends of the Crucifix. Unfortunately, there I have only found a Czech edition, which you can read for free on the Czech Wikisource. If you’re a beginner it will be a difficult read, but if you’ve studied the language for a year or so, you should be OK.

Synopsis
The story takes place about 20 years after the Battle of White Mountain, a time which the Revivalists looked at as the Czech Dark Ages when German culture dominated in the Czech lands. An Italian sculptress, Dona Flavia, is walking along the Charles Bridge at night with her mute assistant. She comes across a man she takes to be a beggar, who she insults by offering money. He is in fact a poet, one who has written nothing and claims it is all stored in his mind. He calls himself Inultus and is described as having blonde, long hair and watery eyes. In other words, he looks like a Romantic image of Jesus. Flavia, who is sculpting a crucified Jesus, asks him to accompany her to her studio, where she reveals her intentions to sculpt him as the Christ. He is taken aback, believing that this would be blasphemous, but Flavia manages to convince him by claiming that such a great work coming out of the Czech nation would soften the heart of the foreign ruler of Bohemia and so ease the lot of the Czechs. Despite the fact she is only sculpting his face, she ties him to a cross and so begins one of the most surreal episodes in Czech literature. Inultus begins to believe that he is actually Jesus, whilst Flavia becomes overcome by an artistic passion that eventually leads to Inultus’s death and Flavia’s suicide.

Zeyer and the Decadents
An important fact about Zeyer is that he wasn’t strictly Czech, he was the son of a Franco-German noble from Alsace and a Jewish mother. He only learnt Czech from his Nanny. It is possibly this foreign aspect of his character which makes Zeyer such an interesting writer. Though there are clear nationalist elements to the work, Inlutus owes more to French symbolism than the quaint rural nostalgia of Erben or Němcová. Zeyer’s description of Jesus recalls El Greco, a favoured artist of the Decadents and the overlap of art and reality was explored in depth by Huysmanns in his bible of Decadence À Rebours.