Ostny a oprátky – Padevět Jiří (2018)

Who was the boy to whom young Ludwig Wittgenstein painted a mustache under his nose with shoe cream? Why did Robert Týfa, the assistant to the executioner in Prague, take a spare shirt to work? What was Edvard Beneš doing at the moment when Klement Gottwald noticed he was wearing mismatched socks, and what role was Jiřina Švorcová rehearsing when she ran out of hairspray? Great and small histories. Do they intersect, or do they pass each other by? Are they aware of each other, or does each have its own rhythm? Writer and publisher Jiří Padevět, in succinctly sketched situations and micro-stories, shows that even in moments when history is being made, its actors, whether they are creators or victims, remain ordinary people grappling with their weaknesses, life stereotypes, and visions of the future. The tragic monumentality of history passing through a hole in a sock. Shoe cream that decides the fate of a nation. The double winner of the Magnesia Litera award has created a mosaic of seemingly absurd situations occurring at pivotal moments in twentieth-century history. More convincingly than all the facts, he has shown that history is not what is described in textbooks, but rather what we may be experiencing right now without realizing it.