Czech Books | All stories

In the last Czech Books we met the artist Helga Weissová-Hošková, who talked about her remarkable wartime diaries. She drew and described what she saw and experienced in the Terezín ghetto, where she was sent at the age of just twelve in 1941. Amazingly, her diaries have only just been published in full, but they have since aroused so much interest that they have been translated into no less than sixteen languages. In the second part of his conversation with Helga, David Vaughan asks her about her life after the war, and the fate of her diaries

When the wartime diaries and drawings of Helga Weissová were published in in Britain last year, they caused quite a stir. Up to that time they had been all but forgotten, even here in her home city of Prague, and only fragments had ever being published. Yet there are few more vivid evocations of life in the Terezín Ghetto, where Helga was sent with her parents in 1941. Her father perished, but miraculously Helga and her mother, as well as her diary and drawings survived. David Vaughan went to meet Helga, now a sprightly 84-year-old, at the flat

At the end of last month, Prague hosted an international conference to discuss some of the issues determining the direction of today’s Europe. The event was organized by the Václav Havel Library, which aims to keep both the political and the literary legacy of the late Czech president alive. Havel saw the European Union as a force for peace and stability, but he was often critical of the EU’s priorities. So it was apt that the conference heard a huge range of views on Europe’s future, from federalist to deeply sceptical. David Vaughan spoke to one

“Socrates on the Equator”, the latest book by the award-winning Czech novelist, Tomáš Zmeškal, offers insights into a huge country in the heart of Africa that for most Czech readers is nothing more than a name: The Democratic Republic of Congo. His book is neither a novel nor a travelogue, but a many-layered account of a very personal journey. David Vaughan talks to the writer.

Until last year Karel Jaromír Erben’s celebrated collection of ballads, Kytice – The Bouquet – had never been published in a full English translation. Now we are lucky enough to have no less than two fresh translations of this classic of 19th century Czech poetry. Last summer we spoke to the translator of one of the new editions, Marcela Sulak, and this time it is the turn of Susan Reynolds, whose translation appeared in a bilingual edition just before Christmas. She talks to David Vaughan.

The work of the novelist Marek Toman is diverse. It takes us from Jewish Prague in the 16th century all the way to the drama of the Velvet Revolution four hundred years later. He has even written one novel in which radio becomes a central character. His latest book, due to be published next year, again takes us back in time. It focuses on a notorious 17th century court case, but is far from being a mere costume drama. In the author’s work the past is always nearer to the present than you might expect. David Vaughan met the novelist.

The Czech Republic and Hungary are countries of similar size with plenty of history in common, whether we look back to the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the common experience of invasion in more recent decades: in 1956 for Hungary and 1968 for Czechoslovakia. And you don’t have to look far to find parallels in the literature of the two countries. In Czech Books, David Vaughan looks at some of these Czech-Hungarian literary links from the point of view of a Czech who is steeped in contemporary Hungarian writing.

Last week, Prague hosted a conference devoted to Ivan Martin Jirous, one of the legends of the Czechoslovak underground of the 70s and 80s, who died in November 2011. The poet, better known as Magor, which means “loony” in English, was familiar to many as the artistic director of the Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe and as the wild man of the underground scene, but over the years his output as a poet has won ever growing acclaim. Much of his best poetry was written during the eight-and-a-half years he spent in communist jails,

In a recent edition of Czech Books, we spoke to the Romany writer, Irena Eliášová. She mentioned that her novel, November, had been published earlier this year by an internet publisher. This inspired David Vaughan to find out more about Romany writing in the digital age, and he discovered that Czech Roma have embraced the social media in a big way.

One of the curious things about Central Europe is how little people from the various countries of the region know about each other. A recent sociological study suggested that Czechs and Poles have very similar views of the world and similar sets of values. They share a border five hundred miles long, speak languages that are close enough for them to be able to understand each other without too much difficulty, and yet the two nations have a habit of acting as if the other didn’t exist. Even in these days of open borders, assumptions and prejudices