In this and the next issue we devote considerable space to the personality and work of Géza Csáth (13 February 1887 - 11 September 1919), who has long been perceived as a cult author in the world, but in the Czech Republic there is still little awareness of him. Next time we will bring you excerpts from his diary, which, alongside his short stories, established his international fame, this time focusing on a unique artefact, his Book of Patients. In it, "among the fragments of now almost incomprehensible information about the patients' health and the sums collected, what stands out above all are the manifestations of the obsessions and fantasies, anxieties and fears of the doctor himself: József Brenner, better known under the pseudonym Géza Csáth, a psychiatrist, morphinist, one of the outstandingly distinctive figures in Hungarian prose of the last century, and also a talented cartoonist and music reviewer, He was himself an amateur musician and violinist - he played the instrument in the corridors of the mental hospital where he was interned after he murdered his wife, Olga Jónás, shortly after the First World War," as Mateusz Chmurski writes in his extensive introductory essay.
This July marks the centenary of the birth of Zbyněk Sekal (12 July 1923 - 24 February 1998). The block marking the anniversary opens with an interview in which Viktor Karlík talks about this extraordinary artist with Duňa Slavíková. We also publish photographs taken for RR by Karel Cudlín in Sekal's Vienna archive-studio in September 2022, as well as an essay by Kristian Sotriffer - he writes that Sekal's "creative process takes the form of a kind of litany progressing from point to point, with the end arriving again at the beginning and vice versa, the beginning itself already containing the end, the journey being the goal and the goal being the journey".
The poems from Paul Celan's collection The Rose of Nobody have been translated by Věra Koubová, who notes that "Celan's poetics does not encrypt events, and yet it is necessary to 'decode' them, because the author is trying to express the unspoken". A collection of new poems by Peter Halmay is entitled 2022. From Hana Kosáková we print a poem and prose. The writer Ivan Matoušek\ prepared for RR a version of a contribution that was heard in spoken form this year on the radio programme Book Pole, and also provided an excerpt from a transcript he took of a lecture by Jan Patočka on Heidegger in 1970. This time the series From Small Publishing Houses is dedicated to the Baobab publishing house.
Jaromír Typlt presents "drawings without communication disorder" by Marie Kohoutková. Zuzana Krišková returns to Václav Žák, a peculiar self-taught painter, for whom painting became "a passion bordering on obsession, which gave his life meaning"; she also recalls the interest he enjoyed in his time from important artists, Eva Fuková, Bohumil Hrabal, Ewald Schorm and others. Excerpts from the illustrator Jakub Bachorík's works accompany his answers to nine questions. The translator Josef Rauvolf contributed to the series Seven and the workplace of Ivan Kafka is presented in the Ateliers section.
In word and image, this autumn issue also commemorates the Tribute to the Railway Bridge, which RR organised in June in the form of a live event and a special edition of the RR newspaper. As always, the final pages are reserved for the critical Couleur.
Czech edition