Being a Czech decadent was by no means an easy thing. Among contemporaries from Vrchlický to Dyk, and in the eye of later Czech literary history, the decadence has been seen as a mere replication of foreign fashions (Macura 1990) – imitative as literature, and somewhat ludicrous as lifestyle. Accepting the common premise that “an artist and a writer has to take root in the midst of what he lives in, and draw his strength from that” (Peroutka 1924, p. 73), one could easily ridicule Czech decadence the way Ferdinand Peroutka did in his 1924 sociological essay Jací jsme:
