Gertruda Steinová a její ne/modernistické zpoždění v Čechách // Gertrude Stein and her delayed appearance in Czech culture

While approaching modernism as a reaction to a major crisis of modernity, the article asks about reasons of American expatriates to come to Europe and focuses on the birth of Gertrude Stein as a modernist. It argues that Stein conceptualized her personal crisis and search for gender identity as insufficiency of American character and immature culture. Thus she invented her own cultural reasons for moving to Paris. The conceptualization shows in her early writings, Q.E.D., Fernhurst and the first draft of The Making of Americans. While rewriting Q.E.D. into Melanctha and writing the other two stories of Three Lives, Stein started to develop her original style of „portraiture“. She did it independently of any literary esthetic movements and, in „impoverishing“ her vocabulary and employing repetition in a search for abstracted truth, she managed to deautomatize the literary language. Her modernist influence was international, and substantial. Her Czech translation history shows a culturally meaningful delay and deformities. On the other, it also speaks of the newly enlivened modernist spirit in the Czech 1960s