Žítkovské bohyně – Tučková Kateřina (2013)

High in the hills of the White Carpathians, isolated, huddled houses stand far from everywhere. People say that this remoteness allowed certain women to preserve knowledge and intuition that the rest of us had lost, passing it down through generations for centuries. They were called goddesses because they could perform “bohovat” — plead with God for help — and perhaps assist his intervention a little. They were also said to see into the future. Why, then, did they not save themselves? Dora Idesová is the last of the goddesses. She resists accepting the outdated way of life and telling visitors’ fortunes from cast wax, as her aunt Surmena does. Everything changes when she realizes that what seemed to be a series of unfortunate coincidences in her life was a carefully devised plan: her placement in a boarding school, Jakoubek’s institutional care and her hospitalization in the psychiatric hospital in Kroměříž. At the end of the 1990s, a file kept by the State Security service on an internal enemy awaits her in the Ministry of the Interior archive in Pardubice — a file on her aunt Surmena. Dora incredulously unravels the unknown fates of her family and the other goddesses. Were the goddesses a danger to trusting patients, or a genuine ideological threat to normalization-era society? Or were envy and human malice responsible for eradicating the last remnant of paganism? This novel by Kateřina Tučková, author of Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch, is a fascinating story about the female soul, magic and a buried part of Czech history. The contents are in Czech.