Thirteen were interpreted during the period 1937-1940 (e.g., Biggles of the Camel Squadron (1937); Biggles in Africa (1938); Biggles in Spain (1939), and Biggles Goes to War (1940))3. The period 1946-1948 saw a further four: Biggles Flies East (1946), Biggles Learns to Fly, Biggles in Borneo (1947), and Biggles Defies the Swastika (1948). The happening to Socialist Czechoslovakia saw them become inaccessible once more, in spite of the fact that they returned quickly in 1968.

II. THE CONCEPT OF RURITANIA AND ITS CONNOTATIONS

Ruritania was first imagined in writing and culture by Anthony Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda. He portrayed it as a German-speaking, Roman Catholic nation, under an outright government, with profound social, yet not ethnic, divisions, as reflected in the contentions delineated in the narratives. Notwithstanding, a portion of Ruritania’s placenames (e.g., Strelsau, Hentzau), propose that a portion of the externally German names have a Slavic substratum, like, e.g., Leipzig, Dresden, Breslau, Posen, Gdingen, and so forth., similarly as with a portion of the individual names, e.g., Marshal Strakencz, Bersonin, Count Stanislas, Luzau-Rischenheim, Strofzin, Boris the Hound, Anton, and so on.

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Topographically, Ruritania is generally situated between domains that would have been called Saxony and Bohemia in Hope’s time. It has become a conventional term, both concrete and theoretical, for a nonexistent pre WW1 European realm utilized as the setting for sentiment, interest and the plots of experience books. Its name has been given to an entire type of composing, the Ruritanian sentiment, and it has spread outside writing to a wide range of other areas.4

This paper will examine Petruželková’s (P) (1994 (1940))5 Czech form of the short-novel-length Biggles Goes To War (BGW; Biggles Letí na Jih (BLJ) in Czech), set in Maltovia, portrayed in plot as a little Ruritanian-type 6 nation with a German-type upper-

class found “somewhat toward the north-east of the Black Sea, depicted by its diplomat to London as “… ..just barely in Europe. … . Asia … . isn’t a long way from our eastern frontier”.7 Its classification echoes Hope’s somewhat, e.g., Max/Ludwig Stanhauser, von Nerthold, Janovica, Bethstein, Menkhoff, Vilmsky, Klein, Nieper, Gustav, and so on. Maltovia is undermined by its neighbor Lovitzna, a marginally bigger nation, additionally Ruritanian to the extent can be judged, depicted by the Maltovian diplomat as: