THE CONCEPT OF RURITANIA AND ITS CONNOTATIONS
Ruritania was first considered in writing and culture by Anthony Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda. He delineated it as a German-speaking, Roman Catholic nation, under a flat out government, with profound social, however not ethnic, divisions, as reflected in the contentions portrayed in the tales. Be that as it may, 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 on., 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.
Geologically, Ruritania is normally situated between regions that would have been called Saxony and Bohemia in Hope’s time. It has become a conventional term, both concrete and unique, 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 variant of the short-novel-length Biggles Goes To War (BGW; Biggles Letí na Jih (BLJ) in Czech), set in Maltovia, depicted in layout as a little Ruritanian-type 6 nation with a German-type upper-
class found “somewhat toward the north-east of the Black Sea, portrayed by its envoy 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 forth. Maltovia is compromised by its neighbor Lovitzna, a marginally bigger commonwealth, likewise Ruritanian to the extent can be judged, portrayed by the Maltovian minister as: “… another state, not enormous, as nations in Europe go, however bigger than we are.” Johns gives minimal enough real 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 tradition), Hotel Stadplatz, Shavros, Stretta Barovsky, do extend a Ruritanian picture like that of Maltovia. Lovitzna is building up a flying corps with the help of European teachers, and the story starts with the Maltovian minister in London asking Biggles, Algy, a
