Vladimír Holan

Vladimír Holan () (1905 - 1980) was a Czech poet famous for employing obscure language, dark topics and pessimist views in his poems. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in the late 1960s. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

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Holan was born in Prague, but he spent most of his childhood outside the Capital. When he moved back in the 1920s he studied law and started a job as a clerk, a position that was a large source of dissatisfaction for the poet. He lost his father and in 1932 married V?ra Pila?ová. In the same year he published the collection of poems Vanutí (Breezing), which he considered his first piece of poetic art (there were two books preceding it: Blouznivý v?jí? /1926/ and Triumf smrti /1930/). It was his only collection to be reviewed by the knight of Czech critics, Franti?ek Xaver ?alda, who compared Holan favorably with the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé.

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In the 1930s Holan continued writing obscure lyrical poetry and slowly started to express his political feelings (reacting to the Spanish Civil War at first). Political poems Odpov?? Francii (The Reply to France), Zá?í 1938 (September 1938) and Zp?v t?íkrálový (Twelfth Night Song) were reactions to the situation in Czechoslovakia from September 1938 till March 1939. They also made him more intelligible and popular. The poem called Sen (The Dream) is a presage of a cruel war (amazingly published in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in April 1939). During the war he published several poetic stories in verse inspired by national humiliation. After the war he published an apocalyptic record of events in his Panychida and chanted about the Red Army in Tob? (To You), Rudoarm?jci (Red Army Soldiers) and Dík Sov?tskému svazu (Thanks to the Soviet Union). He left the Catholic Church and became a member of the Communist Party.

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In 1949 after the communist takeover he was involved in an incident against Soviet influence in the new regime and his work was on the index of Czech literature. He left the Communist Party and reentered the Catholic Church. In the last years of his life he lived in reclusive poverty in the very heart of Prague on the island of Kampa.

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In the 1950s and 1960s he wrote longer poems with a mixture of reality and lyrical abstraction. He is best known in English for his postwar works, both the often teasingly obscure longer poem Noc s Hamletem (A Night with Hamlet, 1964) which became the most often translated Czech poem, and his short, gnomic lyrical reflections, with occasional submerged notes of political protest. He became a legendary poet-recluse.

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He had a daughter Kate?ina born in 1949 in his bad years and in addition to the social problems she suffered from Down's syndrome (he wrote a poem called Bajaja for her which is with Jaroslav Seifert's Maminka one of the basic Czech children poetical works of Czech modern literature - also illustrated by Ji?í Trnka. When she died in 1977, Holan lost the sense of life and ceased writing. He died in a Kampa flat in 1980 and was buried in Ol?any Cemetery.

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Czech: Czech may refer to the following:...

Nobel Prize: The Nobel Prizes are prizes instituted by the will of Alfred Nobel, awarded to people (and also to organizations in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize) who have done outstanding research, invented groundbreaking techniques or equipment, or made outstanding contributions to society. The Nobel Prizes, ...

Communist Party of Czechoslovakia: The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, in Czech and in Slovak: Komunistick? strana ?eskoslovenska (KS?) was a political party in Czechoslovakia that existed between 1921 and 1992....