Společnost nevolnosti – Bělohradský Václav (2025)

This Czech-language collection of essays by Václav Bělohradský examines the problems of modern society through interviews, newspaper essays and reflections. The author observes contemporary social tendencies and trends, identifying a central problem in the growing impulse to withdraw from the world as a shared space and retreat into private subworlds. The individual essays show how this separating tendency affects every area of human life. Most of the essays first appeared in shortened form between 1997 and 2007 in Salon, the literary supplement of the Thursday edition of Právo. An interview with Jiří Rulf appeared in Reflex, an interview with Barbora Osvaldová in Xantypa, and the essay “The Gender of Reason” in the collection New Reading of the World I, published by Marie Chřibková. The reflections are presented here in revised and more complete form. For the second edition, published in 2009, the author revised many of the essays again. Each subsequent edition includes a new introductory text, allowing readers of the latest edition to follow the author’s reflections from the first edition in 2007 to the present.