Vladimír Macura was a highly respected Czech semiotician who won the Czech Republic's State Prize for Literature one year before his premature death from leukemia, in 1999. The son of an engineer, Macura was born in Ostrava in 1945 and later moved to Prague, where he completed his first degree at the Charles University in 1968, the year Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. During the subsequent era of normalization, he held positions at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, becoming its director in 1993. He was an avid scholar of the Czech national revival and also of Estonian culture, finding inspiration in the work of Yuri Lotman and the Tartu School of semiotics. These facts are in the introduction to Hana Pichová and Craig Cravens' competently translated and edited collection of intriguing Macura essays about signs, symbols, myths, and emblems in modern Czech history. Macura's activities in the Baltic Union, an illegal organization with samizdat publications supporting Baltic nations under Soviet occupation, should be added to this information. He belonged to the “grey zone,” that small but notable community of Czechoslovaks who worked against the regime while simultaneously working for it.

The fifteen essays in this volume are divided into two parts: the first devoted to nineteenth-century Czech culture, including the national revival; and the second, longer part to the Socialist and post-Socialist periods. The theme of mystification unites the volume and highlights continuities in Czech culture across the age of nationalism into the Socialist period and beyond. Macura's conception of mystification is quite distinct from standard dictionary definitions and is not synonymous with “perplexity,” “bafflement,” or “bewilderment.” Mystifications belong to worlds of signs—to semiospheres in Lotman's sense—that project idealized visions of reality largely disconnected from material conditions and social structures. Macura's mystifications have the quality of illusions, games, jokes, and even lies, but are deeply important for meaning-production and identity. In “Mystification and the Nation,” arguably the book's most important essay, Macura writes that Czech revivalist culture “created the illusion that a culturally developed Czech society existed with significant scientific and aesthetic strata” and “feigned for itself and the rest of the world the self-evidence of its existence” (9). A spate of “discoveries” around 1800 helped call the illusionary nation into being, including the Královédvorský and Zelenohorský manuscripts later shown to be forgeries. A Czech cultural inclination to inhabit worlds of idealized signs divorced from reality is also pointed to in other essays in the book's first part, including “Where Is My Home?” and “Prague.” Nineteenth-century Czechs did not always take mystifications seriously, Macura tells us. They were “often accompanied by a self-ironic suspicion,” and there was a skeptical side to Czech culture that was “life giving and therapeutic” (10).

The book's cover depicts American-flag bedecked beetles marching on Prague, an image drawn from essays in the second section focusing on Czechoslovakia after 1945, also a time in Czech history rich with mystifications. “The Potato Bug” is about Communist Party efforts to build popular support for itself and the Soviet Union through widely disseminated images of Colorado beetles ravaging the country's farmlands. In the hands of party propagandists, the beetle was no mere insect: It was a dangerous weapon in Cold War battles between capitalism and Socialism—a “‘terrible saboteur transmitted by America,’” “a new ally of the imperialists,” (57) and “‘the six-legged ambassador of Wall Street’” (58). Macura does not explicitly question whether Czechoslovaks truly believed this dark story of biological terror or other Socialist-era mystifications, including the denial of death discussed in “Death of the Leader” or choreographed images of universal love for the party in mass-gymnastics spectacles in “Spartakiad.” Given his participation in the “grey zone” and his argument about the self-ironic and skeptical side of Czech culture, there is no doubt he was well aware that his compatriots could and did feign faith in the Socialist regime and its mystifications. Like the subject of his essay, “The Metro,” what existed under the surface did not always correlate with what was on the surface.

The editors have kept Macura's original footnotes and added comments providing important background information. Scholars of nineteenth-century Czech history will appreciate the book's first section deconstructing the nation; the second half is recommended for teaching courses on postwar Eastern Europe. Some readers will question just how intense and unique the power of signs is in Czech culture compared to other nations in Central Europe and elsewhere.