VIRTUAL HISTORY AND COUNTERFACTUAL NARRATIVE OF THE PAST

In my paper I attempt to characterize and identify the features that alternative historiography and counterfactual historical narrative have in common as well as those they differ in. I draw my inspiration from the theses posited by the pioneer of virtual history, the American historian Niall Ferguson, and from the reflexions on alternative history novels by the Czech critics L. Dolezel and O. Sladek. I assume that it is by means of similar methods and tools that the approaches of present history and postmodernist historical fiction have gotten closer more than ever before. Using three examples of recent Czech prose (Josef Nesvadba: Peklo Bend, 2002; Jachym Topol: Kloktat dehet, 2005; Jan Zenkl: Munkdorf, 2006; Jiri. Polacek: Spesny vlak Ch.24.12, 2010), I present the way the writers treat alternative notion of history, what artistic devices they choose and what authorial intents they pursue by choosing them.