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''The Cowards'' (originallly ''Zbabělci'') is a Czech novel by Josef Škvorecký. Written in 1948–49 but not published until 1958, it is a story from the very end of the Second World War in Europe. Narrated in the first person by a Czech at the end of his teens, Danny Smiřický, it takes place in the week 4–11 May 1945 in his home town, a fictional town called Kostelec in northeast Bohemia, close to the frontier with then-German Middle Silesia (now part of Poland). Škvorecký's prose is mostly narrative and immediate. This is interspersed with introspective passages in which Danny thinks in long sentences of many clauses representing the movement of his mind from one related thought to another. ==Plot== Škvorecký modelled Kostelec on his own home town of Náchod, and Smiřický is a semi-autobigraphical character based on the author. Like Náchod, Kostelec is a border town on a river and overlooked by a castle. Like Škvorecký, Smiřický is the educated, middle-class son of a bank clerk, loves jazz music and has spent two years as a forced labourer in a Messerschmitt aircraft factory. Danny belongs to a jazz and swing band of middle-class young men that plays in a local café and tries to impress the local girls. But everyone knows that Danny's love for the beautiful Irena is unrequited, and instead she loves Zdenek who shares her enthusiasm for mountaineering. The novel opens with Kostelec still under German occupation, and ends a week later after the Red Army has liberated the town. The town's German garrison plans to retreat west in the hope of surrendering to the US Army rather than the Soviets. Kostelec's Czech civic authorities, who had cooperated (and in some cases possibly collaborated) with the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia authorities, want to keep the town calm and avoid bloodshed. They fear that local Czechoslovak Communist (KSČ) partisans are planning a revolution not only against the retreating Germans but also to prevent restoration of the pre-war democratic First Czechoslovak Republic. Somewhere to the east beyond the frontier in German Silesia, ''Waffen-SS'' tanks and infantry are fighting a rearguard action against a Soviet force commanded by a fictitious General Jablonkovski. (Jablonkovski is not to be confused with the real-life Napoleonic General Władysław Jabłonowski, who lived 1769–1802.) Local young men including Danny and his fellow-musicians have a wry and cynical view of the older generation who run the town and try to organise an orderly and peaceful transition throughout the departure of the German garrison and arrival of the Soviets. Danny is motivated not by patriotism or politics but to impress Irena and win her from Zdenek. As the turmoil of the final days of the war in Europe envelop Kostelec, events cause Danny to confront existential questions of his life, its purpose, and his future if he survives the dangerous final phase of the war. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Cowards」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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