Bohemian Dictionary Definitions

As a bohemian it is usual to designate a disorderly and alternative lifestyle that privileges art and culture over social conventions, emerged as a reaction to the values ​​and interests of bourgeois society, and generally attributed to artists and writers. As such, the word comes from the Latin Bohemĭus.

Bohemia is also the person who leads this lifestyle. In general, an eccentric, nonconformist, creative, rebellious, sensitive, indifferent or situated outside of social conventions is recognized as a bohemian, who leads a work life irregularly and emotionally liberal and without ties, mainly interested in the cultivation of the soul through art (painting, literature, music, etc.), philosophy and spiritual contemplation.

As a bohemian or bohemian, you can also designate the natural person of the Bohemian region, located in the current Czech Republic, as well as the language they speak.

Originally, a bohemian was a gypsy. Moreover, today this meaning is maintained, which was initially applied with a derogatory sense among the French to refer to those from the region of Bohemia who presented this way of life.

In fact, the cultural heyday of bohemia occurred in Paris, in the mid-19th century, on the cultural floor offered by the romantic movement. Hence, capital works of Bohemian thought and lifestyle are Scenes of Bohemian life, by the French writer Henry Murger, and the Italian opera Giacomo Puccini entitled The Bohemian, based on the work of the French.

The repercussion of the concept of the bohemian as a lifestyle and attitude towards the existence and artistic fact has been so important among artists, musicians and writers throughout the world, that we can consider a series of movements and cultural currents that have managed to reproduce it and readjust it to his time: the dandis at the beginning of the 20th century, the American beats of the 50s, the hippies of the 60s and, today, the hipster movement , which has been a kind of renewal of the bohemian spirit in tone With the new times.