Home »News »VHL Notebooks 2011/1:...

VHL Notebooks 2011/1: Vladimír Vokolek – Anecdotal Anonymous Nation

February 20, 2011

IllustrationPoems on Communist Putsch written 1948–1950

In all probability the first immediate poetic reflection of the Communist Putsch and the consequent life in lies.

Vladimír Vokolek is usually considered a spiritual poet. However, his life and work rather happened “in seclusions” than “in line”. Contrary to most others, spiritual poets perceived the coming of communist power as a national and ethical catastrophe, see Zahradníček’s Sign of Power. Even among them, Vladimír Vokolek was the only one who in his poems (February, Requiem for Jan Masaryk; Kaspar Hauser) with the original synoptic title Hic iacet took inspiration directly in the February Putsch and subsequent liquidation of inconvenient persons – in particular Jan Masaryk and archbishop Josef Beran. Kaspar Hauser, the hero of a German legend, man without past and without future, is here a metaphor of this impersonal presence of “anecdotal anonymous nation”.

Related events

Share

Facebook | Twitter

Speech on receiving an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem

„My somewhat desultory attitude about studying Kafka’s works comes from my vague feeling that I don't need to read and re-read everything Kafka has written because I know what I’ll find there anyway. I'm even secretly persuaded that if Kafka did not exist, and if I were a better writer than I am, I would have written all his works myself.“

Václav Havel:
Speech on receiving an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, April 26, 1990

Čechoslováci v gulaguCuba´s Black Spring