Upoutat mračna - Básnický obraz Sidonie Nádherné – Fibich Ondřej (2016)

It's just a few words to begin with, but I feel somewhat uneasy about the weight of meaning as, after repeatedly reading an exceptional collection, I ventured back to where Ondřej Fibich first led us, to the images of a woman 'lost in the greenery.' And in my cryptic search, I realized a very specific fact: that the road from Strakonice to Janovice runs around us. Janovice is over the hill, about an 'hour's walk' away. And to Janovice, the poet traveled on his journey from the south 'through the shattered gate of the landscape near Počepice,' where the statues of St. John and St. Wenceslas stand, now restored and hopefully still unscathed. I often think of Sidonie Nádherná, around whose former estate I drive almost daily to Benešov; I perceive her as an image of our country. With her European culture and the tragedy of its development. Family, education, a sense of aesthetics and poetry, the First World War, the collapse of the monarchy, land reform, the glory of the First Republic, the Second World War, German occupation, she was driven by the SS from the castle to the farm behind the Sedlčany railway, where she could only watch the destruction of her cultivated garden. Then liberation with tanks in the courtyard, and soon after, a flood of the red rabble and a looted or shattered interior. Finally, the escape to England, her death shortly thereafter, and after a long time, the return of her remains — while reminiscing after the revolution and...