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The Decadent movement, associated with French writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarmae, Verlaine, and Huysmans, had a strong following in the Czech lands at the turn of the twentieth century. As subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with little political power in an age of alienation and social disintegration, the Czechs had much to be pessimistic about. These poems reflect their hopelessness and despair and their obsession with death, as well as their attraction to perversity and sin in protest against the banality and futility of ordinary life. The vast majority of these poems, composed by the three foremost Czech Decadents--Jiri Karasek ze Lvovic, Otokar Brezina, and Karel Hlavacek--have never before appeared in English translation.

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