The present study deals with Růžena Svobodová’s prose work from the turn of the century. It views the novels Zamotaná vlákna (Tangled Threads, 1899), Milenky (Mistresses, 1902) and the collection of short stories Pěšinkami srdce (The Paths of the Heart, 1902) as aesthetic phenomena, through which it is to some extent possible to (re-)construct the literary debate going on at that time, its trends and its transformations. By interpreting these novels and short stories against the backdrop of our knowledge of the author’s early works, as well as by comparing their journal and book versions, we aim to identify new elements in their content and form, which are essentially a manifestation of movements in the literary field.
By a commutative term we mean an element of the free commutative groupoid $F$ of infinite rank. For two commutative terms $a$, $b$ write $a\le b$ if $b$ contains a subterm that is a substitution instance of $a$. With respect to this relation, $F$ is a quasiordered set which becomes an ordered set after the appropriate factorization. We study definability in this ordered set. Among other things, we prove that every commutative term (or its block in the factor) is a definable element. Consequently, the ordered set has no automorphisms except the identity.