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: “… another state, not huge, as nations in Europe go, yet bigger than we are.” Johns gives minimal enough genuine data on Maltovia, and even less on Lovitzna, in spite of the fact that the names he cites for the last nation, e.g., Zarovitch (the name of the decision administration), Hotel Stadplatz, Shavros, Stretta Barovsky, do extend a Ruritanian picture like that of Maltovia. Lovitzna is building up an aviation based armed forces with the help of European educators, and the story starts with the Maltovian diplomat in London asking Biggles, Algy, and Ginger to create one for Maltovia to counter the danger from Lovitzna.
BGW incorporates scenes, for example, e.g., Biggles telling a German pilot that local people “dislike us, you know, they are volatile (93; No. 17 underneath)”, which may have evoked unwelcome pictures and meanings among Czech perusers, particularly during the period when BGW and BLJ were first published.8 The arrangement picked by P to deal with such circumstances has been to go one little above and beyond than interpretation, and to transpose the story, moving Maltovia to some unclear spot in the Middle East,
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