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Czech with Slovak at Oxford

Czech with Slovak is taught at Oxford by Dr Rajendra Chitnis (literature and translation from Czech and Slovak), Dr Vanda Pickett (Czech language) and Professor Jan Fellerer (linguistics).

You can study Czech with Slovak at Oxford in combination with:

  • French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish. You can only be a beginner in one language of study.
  • Classics, English, History or Philosophy. 
  • Czech with Slovak can't be studied at Oxford without a second subject.

The course normally lasts four years, with the third year spent abroad, at least half of it normally in the Czech Republic or Slovakia. Most undergraduates who study Czech at Oxford are complete beginners, but we also provide appropriately tailored language teaching for native speakers or those with existing knowledge of Czech or Slovak. 

Language classes in all four years focus on developing high-level active and passive skills in Czech. From Second Year, in translation and literature classes, you will also acquire an excellent reading knowledge of Slovak, which is very closely related to Czech, but also closer than Czech to Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. To advance your Slovak further, you can choose to study the history of Slovak in linguistics options and to prioritise the study of Slovak texts in your literature classes. Students sometimes also attend Slovak summer school and/or spend part of their year abroad in Slovakia. 

Why Czech with Slovak?
  • Studying Joint Honours in Czech with Slovak will give you the same highly prized skill set as any other language/humanities combination at Oxford, but in a way that stands out from the crowd. It suggests that you are clever, independent, intellectually curious, unafraid to be different and to take on a challenge.
  • Our graduates report that studying a less familiar language, culture, history and society seems to enhance the analytical and personal qualities employers value most in modern languages graduates, e.g. the ability to see and approach things from alternative perspectives, to solve problems, spot patterns, work collaboratively, read between the lines, formulate and reformulate ideas and communications, stamina, resilience, and the self-confidence to lead in the face of intellectual or practical challenges. 
  • Czech with Slovak usually proves a new and decisive stage in our students' language-learning, which marks them out as language-learning specialists. Studying Czech with Slovak takes you across a major linguistic and psychological border in Europe. Our graduates report that knowledge of them not only made it easy to learn other Slavonic languages (like Russian and Polish), but also gave them the confidence to take on any other language, including unrelated but similarly complex Middle Eastern or Asian languages.
  • In contrast to most modern languages courses, Czech with Slovak is a rare opportunity to study European culture and history from the perspective of 'small nations' that did not build empires, but preserved their languages and formed national identities often while under the rule of others. The course is a profound introduction to Central Europe, the meeting-place of German, Latin, Slavonic, Jewish and Hungarian worlds, equipping you to explore further what Milan Kundera described as 'maximum diversity in minimum space'.
  • The Czechs have a long intellectual and literary tradition, from (proto-)Protestant thinkers like Jan Hus and Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius) to Karel Capek, Milan Kundera and the playwright and anti-Communist dissident, Václav Havel. They are equally well-known, however, for their folk culture and the ribald 'pub culture' of Jaroslav Hašek and his good soldier Švejk and Bohumil Hrabal. Particular high points are Czech's rich medieval literature, the Fin-de-Siècle (1890s), the Surrealist Avant-garde and the literature of the 1960s 'Prague Spring'. That period also saw the blossoming of Czechoslovak new wave cinema, part of a rich history of visual culture. The Czechs are notable for the prominence of women in their cultural development, from Bozena Nemcová (the founder of their modern prose tradition) to the outstanding film-maker Vera Chytilová and beyond.  
  • The Czech Republic is a major economic and strategic partner of the UK, most recently reflected in an agreement between Rolls Royce and the leading Czech energy conglomerate to develop new nuclear power technology. Czechs currently own the Royal Mail and the National Lottery and hold major investments in the British energy and steel sectors, not to mention Sainsbury's and West Ham United. The Czechs have a long history of entrepreneurship and innovation and are pioneers in a wide range of new digital, medical and security technologies. They punch above their weight in many fields, notably sport. Prague is one of the world's most beautiful, prosperous and liveable capital cities and a major regional centre for business, finance and many other industries. 
  • Czechs commonly feel closer to the British mindset and worldview than to the French or German, with enduring memories of Czechs and Slovaks receiving refuge and fighting alongside Britain in the Second World War, notably in North Africa and the Battle of Britain, not to mention strong religious and cultural links dating back to the Middle Ages. 
What is the course like?

You will typically find yourself in a group of four to six. All teaching takes place in the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in small, informal groups, similar to your college tutorial groups in your other subject. You will get to know your tutors very well. There is constant opportunity for class discussion, considerable flexibility about what we study and how, and plenty of individual attention and support. 

Language Classes

You will have four hours of intensive, small-group language classes weekly in First and Second Year, taught mainly by a highly experienced native-speaker tutor, Dr Vanda Pickett, with three in Final Year. 

In First Year (Prelim), we focus on introducing and using Czech grammar in context and developing writing and translating skills, working through the third edition of Colloquial Czech by James Naughton alongside other materials. In the exams at the end of First Year, you will translate passages from and into Czech and sentences testing grammar specifics. You need a minimum of 40% to pass, but can expect to do much better!

In Second and Final Year (FHS), you will have dedicated oral, writing and translation classes that develop your confidence and range. In translation classes, you work on literary, academic and journalistic texts in both Czech and Slovak, covering various contexts, periods and themes that allow you to learn more about their history, culture, politics and society, and acquire a complex understanding of each language and the differences between them.

At the end of final year, you will take the following in-person language exams: 

  • Translation into Czech and Essay in Czech
  • Translation from Czech
  • Translation from Slovak
  • Oral/aural exam in Czech  
Literature and Linguistics

First Year (Prelim)

  • Czech Poetry and Drama (compulsory)
  • Czech Short Fiction (compulsory)

Second and Final Year (Final Honours School, or FHS)

  • Czech and Slovak Literature since 1816 (compulsory) plus at least one of:
  • The History of Czech and Slovak (linguistics)
  • Medieval Czech Texts
  • Modern Czech and Slovak Authors
  • Dissertation on a topic of your choice

In comparison to other universities, it can seem that our course lacks variety, but in fact that variety is contained within the different papers. Above all, thanks to our small class groups, you will be given plenty of opportunities to choose what you study and from what perspectives. We use literary texts not only to develop your skills of critical analysis and understanding of critical methods, but also as springboards to explore history, society and politics from the reign of Charles IV, the Hussite proto-Reformation and the Counter-Reformation through the nineteenth-century national awakenings to Nazi occupation and Communism and beyond. We consider questions of not only literary aesthetics, movements and techniques, but also gender, national identity and nationalism, race and ethnicity, religion, sexuality, ideology, philosophy, psychology, cinematic adaptation and so on. 

First Year Literature

These classes are closely linked to your language classes and focus on developing your ability to read in Czech. Two classes a week focus on close reading of a small number of set texts including short stories, poetry and plays. We translate and discuss the language and note features of grammar and syntax before plunging into literary analysis. You will encounter classic texts like the Romantic epic Máj (1836) by Karel Hynek Mácha, the Symbolist cycle Mstivá kantiléna (1898) by Karel Hlavácek, the 'robot play', R.U.R. (1920) by Karel Capek and stories by Jan Neruda and Milan Kundera, as well as less familiar and more contemporary texts. What starts as a tricky puzzle becomes an unparalleled way of deepening your grasp of how Czech works and has developed over the past two hundred years. You will also have an unassessed weekly class that explores literature in the context of the history of the Czechs and Slovaks from the Middle Ages to the fall of Communism.

In the exams at the end of First Year you write a mixture of commentaries and essays on texts studied during the year.  

Second and Final Year

You take at least one and up to three literary/linguistic papers in Czech with Slovak. All students must take the survey paper Czech and Slovak Literature since 1816, and may also choose to take papers in medieval Czech literature and/or focused on the deeper extended study of two modern authors chosen from a list. 

We typically mix study of some canonical texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with texts chosen by students based on their interests, with a balance of female and male authors and a particular focus on more contemporary and recent writing in Final Year. Classes combine seminar discussion with essay tutorials; you will typically write four tutorial essays (c.1200 words each) per paper per term, so your research, writing and communication skills very quickly improve.

You may additionally or instead take a linguistics paper in the History of the Czech and Slovak languages, which explores the development of orthography, phonology, morphology and syntax from earliest written sources to the present. You may also choose to write a supervised dissertation on a cultural or linguistic topic of your choice, which may be comparative with material from the other half of your course.

All papers taken in Second and Final Year are assessed by final exam at the end of Final Year, except the dissertation, which is a coursework submission at Easter of Final Year.

The Year Abroad

You will normally spend at least half of the year abroad in a Czech- or Slovak-speaking setting. Unlike some universities, Oxford does not require students to study or to spend time in a specific placement; instead, we allow you to plan your year abroad independently, with advice and support. Students of Czech with Slovak typically study and/or work, but also find time to travel widely within the Czech Republic, Slovakia and elsewhere in Central Europe.

We currently offer study placements with Masaryk University, Brno, and the University of Ostrava; in return, we host students from those universities who attend classes with you at Oxford. We anticipate that these exchanges will return to the EU Erasmus programme from 2027-28. We also offer a volunteer teaching placement at a leading grammar school in Brno. 

While, since Brexit, it has sadly become very difficult for students with UK passports to obtain paid work in the EU, our students have proved very resourceful in finding interesting and rewarding volunteer internships, for example, with charities or research institutes.  

In addition, each year you can apply for Czech government scholarships to study for one month at a university summer school, in a variety of locations throughout the Czech Republic.

Reading Lists

The primary language textbook we use throughout the degree in Czech is:

  • James Naughton, Colloquial Czech (Routledge, 2010).

Please ensure that you obtain the MOST RECENT (3rd) edition.

For reference purposes throughout your studies in Czech, we also recommend you acquire:

  • James Naughton, Czech: An Essential Grammar (Routledge, 2005)

You may be able to obtain these and other recommended books second-hand, via websites like AbeBooks or the Used section of Amazon.

First Year Prescribed Texts

Poetry:

  • Karel Hynek Mácha: Máj (1836)

Available with a translation at: https://czech.mml.ox.ac.uk/karel-hynek-macha-maj-1836

  • Karel Hlavácek: Mstivá kantiléna (1898)

Available at: https://czech.mml.ox.ac.uk/karel-hlavacek-mstiva-kantilena-1898

Drama:

  • Karel Capek: R.U.R. (1920)

Available at: https://web2.mlp.cz/koweb/00/03/34/75/81/rur.pdf

There are many translations available, notably Rossum’s Universal Robots, translated by David Short, with a foreword by Arthur Miller (Hesperus, 2011). Other good translations include R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), translated by Claudia Novack-Jones, with a foreword by Ivan Klíma (Penguin, 2004) and Four Plays: R.U.R., The Insect Play, The Makropulos Case, The White Plague, translated by Peter Majer & Cathy Porter (Methuen, 1999).

Short Prose:

  • Jan Neruda: ‘Jak si pan Vorel nakouril penovku’ (1876)

Available at: https://edicee.ucl.cas.cz/images/data/soubory/Neruda/povidky%20malostranske/Jak%20si%20pan%20vorel%20nakou%C5%99il%20p%C4%9Bnovku.pdf

Translated by Michael Henry Heim as ‘How Mr Vorel Broke In His Meerschaum’ in Prague Tales (Central European University Press, 1993).

  • Ruzena Jesenská: ‘Mimo svet’ (1909)

Translated by Kathleen Hayes as ‘A World Apart’ in A World Apart and Other Stories: Czech Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (Karolinum, 2001, 2021).

  • Milan Kundera: ‘Falešný autostop’ (1965)

Translated by Suzanne Rappaport as 'The Hitchhiking Game' in Laughable Loves (Faber & Faber, definitive revised version, 1999).

  • Jan Balabán: ‘Kluk’ (2004)

Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski as ‘Boy’ in Jan Balabán, Maybe We’re Leaving (Glagoslav, 2018).

Learn More about the Czechs and Slovaks

The following is designed for those curious to learn more about the subject and for those preparing for interview at Oxford.

To get a varied taste of the Czechs past and present, Radio Prague International - Czech Radio's English-language station - is a wonderful resource not only for news and current affairs, but also for learning about Czech culture and history through accessible and well-informed features and interviews. Especially recommended are Czechia in 30 Minutes, the podcast library Czechast and the series The Czech Books You Must Read. The BBC's Rob Cameron, who has lived in the Czech Republic for many years, runs a very informative and thought-provoking series called Based in Bohemia.

James Naughton, who founded Czech and Slovak Studies in its modern form at Oxford, wrote webpages providing a brief history of the Czechs, a longer history of Czech literature (starting here) and a shorter introduction to Slovak literature.

Among the best English-language book histories currently available are 

  • Demetz, Peter, Prague in Black and Gold: The History of a City (Penguin, 1998).
  • Pánek, Jaroslav et al. (eds), A History of the Czech Lands (Karolinum Press, 2011).
  • Teich, M. et al. (eds), Slovakia in History (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Literature

The twenty-first century has seen a boom in the translation into English of Czech and more recently Slovak literature past and present. You can follow the latest news about Slovak literature in translation here. A useful survey of Czech poetry in translation is here. Recently published anthologies include:

  • A World Apart and Other Stories: Czech Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle, selected and translated by Kathleen Hayes (Karolinum, 2001, 2021).
  • Povídky: Short Stories by Czech Women, edited by Nancy Hawker, (Portobello, 2006)
  • And My Head Exploded: Tales of Desire, Delirium and Decadence from Fin-de-Siècle Prague, selected and translated by Geoffrey Chew (Jantar, 2018).
  • Beyond the World of Men: Women’s Fiction at the Czech Fin de Siècle, selected and translated by Geoffrey Chew (Karolinum, 2024).
  • Solitude, Vanity, Night: An Anthology of Czech Decadent Poetry, selected and translated by Kirsten Lodge (Snuggly, 2025).
  • Into the Spotlight: New Writing from Slovakia, edited and translated by Magdalena Mullek and Julia Sherwood (Slavica, 2017)
  • The Dedalus Book of Slovak Literature, edited by Peter Karpinský (Dedalus, 2015)

Here are some other recommendations from different periods:

Contemporary Literature

  • Nicol Hochholczerová - This Room Is Impossible To Eat (Slovak 2021, English 2025)

A moving, chilling reconstruction of how a teenage girl is groomed by her art teacher.

  • Jáchym Topol - The Devil's Workshop (Czech 2009, English 2013)

A breakneck, disorientating satire by the best-known contemporary Czech novelist, here reflecting on the commercial and political exploitation of the memory of atrocities in central Europe.

  • Tomáš Zmeškal - Love Letter in Cuneiform (Czech 2008, English 2016)

A jigsaw-puzzle love story set against the background of Communist Czechoslovakia.

  • Petra Hulová - Three Plastic Rooms (Czech 2006, English 2017)

A Prague sex-worker reflects frankly on her professional and personal life amid rampant consumerism and digital technology.

  • Daniela Kapitánová - Samko Tále's Cemetery Book (Slovak 2000, English 2011)

The blackly comic monologue of an intellectually disabled man who collaborates with authoritarianism - a satire of post-Communist Slovakia that foreshadows the international rise of Trumpian nativist chauvinism. 

  • Daniela Hodrová - A Kingdom of Souls, the first novel in the trilogy City of Torment (Czech 1991-93, English 2021)

Amid the German occupation, a Jewish girl called Alice falls from the window of the Prague house where the author would later grow up. Each accompanies the other through a wonderland labyrinth of interlinked stories drawing on the city's history, where everything is animate and the dead can seem more alive than the living.

The Communist Period

  • Václav Havel - The Audience (Czech 1975, available in various volumes of his plays)

A one-act comedy in which an increasingly drunk brewery manager conducts a performance review of an employee, an anti-government intellectual forced to take unskilled work in the brewery. 

  • Zdena Salivarová - Summer in Prague (Czech 1972, English 1973)

An independent-minded young woman tries to navigate life in Stalinist Czechoslovakia.

  • Leopold Lahola - The Last Thing (Slovak 1968, English 2025)

Gripping, moving short stories written by a Slovak Jewish writer who avoided concentration camp and joined the partisan resistance, mapping his experience and that of Slovakia and its Jews during the Second World War.

  • Ladislav Fuks - The Cremator (Czech 1967, English 1984)

The creepy story of how an upstanding Czech family man is seduced by Nazism. Fuks adapted the novel for the Slovak Juraj Herz's 1969 chilling film, often considered the greatest work of Czechoslovak cinema.

  • Milan Kundera - The Joke (Czech 1967, definitive English 1992)

A revenge story that powerfully explores hubris and 'toxic' masculinity, and the despair felt in middle age by those who, as students, had supported the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. First novel by the internationally most famous Czech author of this period, who also wrote, for example, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).

  • Bohumil Hrabal - Closely Watched Trains (Czech 1965, English 1968)

A short comic novel about a hormonal young man and his work at a provincial railway station during the German occupation, made into a 1968 Oscar-winning film by Jirí Menzel. The most popular Czech author of this period among Czechs, Hrabal also wrote, for example, The Death of Mr Baltisberger and Other Stories (1966), I Served the King of England (1989) and Too Loud A Solitude (1989).

The Interwar Period

  • Vítezslav Nezval - Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czech 1945, English 2005)

A Surrealist dream-novel reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, but drawing elaborately on Gothic literature to depict a young girl's coming-of-age. Made into an acclaimed film by Jaromír Jireš in 1970. Nezval was the outstanding poet of the inter-war Avant-garde; collections in English include Woman in the Plural, The Absolute Gravedigger and Prague with Fingers of Rain.

  • Ivan Olbracht - The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich (Czech 1937, English 1967)

A short novel about a young woman from a Hasidic Jewish community in rural Subcarpathian Ruthenia who moves for love to industrial Ostrava, originally part of a cycle of stories translated as The Bitter and The Sweet.

  • Karel Capek - War with the Newts (Czech 1936, English 1937)

Classic science-fiction, documenting the human discovery and exploitation of highly intelligent sea creatures, a satire on capitalism, authoritarianism, militarism and environmental destruction that resonates today.

  • Jaroslav Hašek - The Good Soldier Švejk (Czech 1923, English 1930)

A picaresque cycle of comic tales following a working-class Prague man's efforts to participate - or not - in the First World War. 

Pre-1914

  • Viktor Dyk - The Pied Piper or The Ratcatcher (Czech 1915, English 2014)

A short novel adaptation of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn. 

  • Jirí Karásek - A Gothic Soul (Czech 1900, English 2015)

Arguably the first Czech queer novel, by a writer often loosely described as the Czech Oscar Wilde. A moving Decadent story of unrequited love, exploring a young man's sense of not belonging in a bourgeois Prague he loathes.

  • Jan Neruda - Prague Tales (Czech 1878, English 1996)

Satirical comic stories about life in the Czech-speaking petty-bourgeois community based in Prague's Little Quarter, where the author grew up in the 1840s. 

  • Bozena Nemcová - The Grandmother (Czech 1855, English 2025)

A pastoral memoir of childhood in the Bohemian countryside, exploring different women's choices in love.

  •  Karel Jaromír Erben - Kytice (Czech 1853, English 2012/2013)

Scary folk tales retold in verse, available in a bilingual edition published by Jantar.

Film

Czech/Czechoslovak cinema has won the Best Foreign Film Oscar three times, for the Slovak wartime film The Shop on the High Street (Ján Kádár, Elmar Klos, 1965), the Hrabal adaptation Closely Observed Trains (Jirí Menzel, 1966) and Kolya (Jan Sverák, 1996), a romanticised account of the last years of Communism, through the eyes of a little Russian boy and the grumpy Czech cellist who is forced to foster him.

Other recommended Czech-language films from the post-Communist period include Waves (Jirí Mádl, 2024), a gripping account of the response of Czechoslovak Radio to the Prague Spring and Soviet-led military intervention of 1968, Burning Bush (Agnieszka Holland, 2013), about the aftermath of Jan Palach's self-immolation on Prague's Wenceslas Square in January 1969, Alois Nebel (Tomáš Lunák, 2011), based on Rudiš/Jaromír 99 graphic novels about the Czech-German borderlands, and Cosy Dens (Jan Hrebejk, 1999), a much-loved family comedy about 1960s Czechoslovakia.

The 1960s ‘new wave’ is marked typically by experiment, sharp comedy and subversive political satire. Classics include Daisies (Vera Chytilová, 1966), A Report on the Party and Guests (Jan Nemec, 1966), The Firemen’s Ball (Miloš Forman, 1967), Marketa Lazarová (František Vlácil, based on a Vladislav Vancura novel, 1967), The Cremator (Juraj Herz, based on a Ladislav Fuks novel, 1969) and The Ear (Karel Kachyna, 1970).