Abstract
While approaching modernism of the turn of the centuries as a reaction to a major crisis of modernity, the article asks about reasons of American expatriates to come to Europe and focuses on the birth of Gertrude Stein as a modernist. It argues that Stein conceptualized her personal crisis in an intimate relationship and search for gender identity as insufficiency of American character and immature culture.
Thus she invented her own cultural reasons for moving to Paris. The conceptualization shows in her early writings, Q.E.D., Fernhurst and the first draft of The Making of Americans.
After moving to Paris in 1903, while rewriting Q.E.D. into Melanctha and writing the other two stories of Three Lives, Stein started to develop her original style of "portraiture". Not only did she do it independently of any literary esthetic movements (she was rather inspired by new streams in fine arts), but she, in "impoverishing" her vocabulary and employing repetition in a search for abstracted truth, managed to deautomatize the literary language and free it from any traditional expectations.
Her modernist influence was international, and substantial. Her Czech translation history that is examined in the second part of the article shows, however, a culturally meaningful delay and deformities.
On the other hand it also speaks of the newly enlivened modernist spirit in the Czech 1960s.