Moravský pitaval – Uhlíř Dušan (2011)

History is full of dramatic stories of wrongdoing and punishment. Many of them are remarkable for their characters, others for their circumstances, and still others for their settings, but they all have one thing in common – troubled human destinies. They have always been a rich source of inspiration for writers and journalists, leading to the emergence of a distinct genre that deals with them. At its inception was an extensive collection of reports on famous criminal and court cases compiled by the French lawyer and writer François Gayot de Pitaval in the first half of the 18th century, published in a total of twenty volumes. Pitaval had several successors, and the fame he achieved led to his name being used as a genre designation – in literature and today also in television and radio. The Moravian Pitaval, authored by the renowned Brno historian and university professor Dušan Uhlíř (born 1938), who has written numerous publications on significant events in modern history and has received several prestigious awards for them, claims this tradition in his own way. It contains thirty stories from Moravian history, whose roots lie in both distant and relatively recent past. They tell of kings and knights, soldiers and priests, heroes and traitors, robbers and lawmen, and depict their colorful, troubled...