When in 1836, a few months before his untimely death, the twenty-five years old Karel Hynek Mácha published Máj (May), a poem that was to become the crown jewel of Czech literature, his contemporaries were perplexed. This was not the kind of writing they would have expected from a patriot. And there was little doubt that Mácha was a patriot — the very fact that he chose to write in Czech confirmed it. His talent was admired and so was the undeniable richness and beauty of his imagery, but there was some consternation that it should all be wasted on an intensely lyric contemplation smacking of nihilism and set within the framework of a Gothic tale of patricide, suicide and execution. At the time of a laborious struggle for national re-awakening, most people held a different view of the purpose of literature and the role of the writer in Czech society.