Jan Neruda as a balladeer in the 1850s and 1860s The uncertainty of life's destination and the meaning of modern literature

The present study deals with Neruda's authorial work on certain themes and (balladic) narratives. Broader intertextual and comparative interrogation takes into account the emergence of the pre-romantic or sentimental ballad (with focus on texts by Burger, Goethe and Poe). Balladicity, as we call the discussed feature of Neruda's own poetics, makes it possible to link up the interpretive starting points available for the Tales of the Lesser Quarter and the Arabesques with the author's poetry, as we demonstrate in his Books of Verse. In light of several interpretative surveys and Baudelaire's approach to quotidianity and modernity, the study concludes by Neruda's idea of a historically conditioned and humanly valid artistic "truth".