On Milena Jesenská’s Relations

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the context of the education and subsequent journalistic activity of Milena Jesenská (1896-1944) and identify her main personal and intellectual relationships. The richness of these relationships, which crossed the borders of the Czech language and culture and placed themselves within the broader framework of the Central European culture of the first decades of the 20th century, has its roots in the “asymmetrical” bilingualism that characterised the Habsburg Empire; the particular kind of linguistic communication present in Jesenská’s correspondence permits to recognise linguistic uses that subsequently disappeared and some dynamics specific to the composite social and cultural fabric of the time.Keywords: Milena Jesenská, Central European culture, Prague German literature, asymmetrical bilingualism.