verbal art; superstitious tales; Orlová region; Karel Dvořáček; estate

In the as yet unprocessed estate of the writer Karel Dvořáček (1911-1945), there is a relatively large number of records of both prosaic and in verse verbal art acquired by the author in the 1930s during his time as a teacher in Karviná and Porubá (Orlová-Poruba). From the rich genre spectrum of folkloric texts collected by Dvořáček, this study has chosen superstitious tales (i.e. shorter narratives of supposedly supernatural beings and unexplained phenomena encountered by people in reál environments) to try to reconstruct, at least in rough outlines, a more or less authentic picture of the period superstitious thinking in the interwar Orlová region.