Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Baroque in European Literatures of the West and the East

Abstract

The author of the present study deals with the whole complex of religious, cultural and artistic phenomenon linked with the rise of the European Reformation with special regard to the situation of Central and Eastern Europe and in the Slavonic literary world. He attempts to demonstrate that there are some pre-reformation streams which came into existence in the period of the Hussite wars and had a much differentiated shape and structure. The roots of the Reformation process in its initial and ideological substance are intereresting as typical phenomena of Central European social and religious thought inspired by various currents, often of Eastern origin, connected with buddhism, manicheism and zoroastrianism. Though the Reformation is sometimes understood as a phenomenon leading to disintegration of hitherto existing universal structures of European thought, it, on the contrary, led to a new attempt at the restoration and renovation of former unity of thought forming one cultural and artistic whole. In the centre of this interpretation there is Petr Chelčický as an inspirer of the Czech/Moravian Brethren, Comenius as a bishop of this first non-Catholic Christian Church in the world some 200 years later and his pansophy as an attempt at the synthesis and universal view coming into existence under the impact of the tragedies of European religious clashes and wars also reflected in his artistic creations. The Baroque art, initially the weapon of Counter-Reformation, was gradually becoming a synthetic style acceptable both by all the enlightened European intellectuals and by wider circles of Christian population as its folk type. We can hardly understand these phenomena without taking into consideration their different realisations in the West and in the East — from England to Russia — including the literature dealing with them.