Kafka, Dvořák, Mucha, Navrátilová — the Czechs whose work travelled further than their country ever did.
For a nation of ten million people, the Czech lands have exported an improbable number of names. Some you know without knowing they were Czech: the writer whose surname became an adjective, the tennis player who redefined the women’s game, the chemist whose invention sits in millions of eyes every morning. Here are the people worth knowing before you visit — and where in Prague you can still stand in their footsteps.
Writers
弗朗兹·卡夫卡 (1883–1924) wrote in German, lived almost his whole life in Prague, and gave the world the word Kafkaesque. Jaroslav Hašek created the Good Soldier Švejk, the most Czech character ever written. Karel Čapek introduced the word robot in his 1920 play R.U.R.Milan Kundera 和 Bohumil Hrabal carried Czech literature through the communist decades.
Composers
Antonín Dvořák wrote the New World Symphony while directing a conservatory in New York. Bedřich Smetana composed Má vlast after going deaf. Leoš Janáček built melodies from the rhythms of spoken Czech.
Artists
阿尔方斯穆夏 defined Art Nouveau in Paris, then spent eighteen years painting the twenty vast canvases of the Slav Epic. František Kupka was among the first painters anywhere to go fully abstract.
Scientists and inventors
Otto Wichterle invented the soft contact lens — the first prototype built on his kitchen table with a children’s construction set. Jaroslav Heyrovský won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Jan Evangelista Purkyně gave his name to cells in your brain and your heart.
Sport
Martina Navrátilová won 59 Grand Slam titles. Emil Zátopek took three golds at the 1952 Olympics, including a marathon he had never run before. Jaromír Jágr was still playing professional hockey in his fifties.
经常问的问题
Who is the most famous Czech person?
Internationally, probably Franz Kafka — though he wrote in German and would have found the question absurd. Within the Czech Republic, Emil Zátopek and Antonín Dvořák are held in comparable regard.
Was Kafka Czech or German?
Both and neither. He was a German-speaking Jewish citizen of Austria-Hungary, born and buried in Prague, writing in a city where three cultures overlapped.
Where can I see their traces in Prague?
The Mucha Museum and the Kafka Museum are central; Dvořák and Smetana both have dedicated museums, and Vyšehrad cemetery holds most of them.
Read more: more people who lived in Prague, Prague history 和 classical concerts.
Last reviewed in August 2026.
