Helena Frischerová: The Days of My Life
- Where: Václav Havel Library, Ostrovní 13, Prague 110 00
- When: November 29, 2017, 19:00 – 21:00
Evening dedicated to the Czech publication of the labour camp memoires of the Prostějov-born Helena Frischerové (1906–1937–1984), which have been brought out by publishers Academia in a translation by Radka Rubilina.
Helena Frischerová, who left with her husband to work in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, was the model for Ri Gustavovna, the protagonist of Jiří Weil’s 1937 cautionary novel Moskva–hranice (Moscow-Border). In the year that Weil’s book came out Frischerová became, like many foreigners living in the USSR, a victim of the Great Terror. She was sentenced to a decade in corrective labour camps in northern Russia while her husband was executed. She wrote her memoires of her time in the Gulag, stylised in an urgent second person, in Russia in the 1960s. She never returned to Czechoslovakia and died in Moscow surrounded by friends from the camps.
The story of Helena Frischerová and her memoires will be introduced by Alena Machoninová, author of the foreword to the Czech edition. Marie Štípková will read excerpts from the book.