"Priests in prisons": Religious Experience in Extreme Circumstances - the Theopoetics of Jan Zahradníček's (1951-1960) Poem Written behind Bars
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11210%2F18%3A10385630" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11210/18:10385630 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
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DOI - Digital Object Identifier
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Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
"Priests in prisons": Religious Experience in Extreme Circumstances - the Theopoetics of Jan Zahradníček's (1951-1960) Poem Written behind Bars
Original language description
In April and July 1952 Brno and Prague were the scenes of show trials of alleged "agents in the service of the Vatican and the USA", contrived by the Communist state security apparatus to dispose of opposition Catholic intellectuals and writers. The trials ended with one death penalty, one sentence of life imprisonment and long prison sentences of seven to twenty-five years. Those convicted included one of the most striking exponents of 1930s and 1940s modern Czech verse, Jan Zahradniček (1905-1960), who was jailed for thirteen years. In the extreme conditions of incarceration Zahradniček never stopped writing poetry, or rather reciting it to his fellow-inmates, who learned the poems by heart. On his release from prison under the general amnesty of May 1960 Zahradniček - in the five months of life left to him - reconstructed the poems. This essay focuses on the theopoetics of his prison poems which picked up on the main topic of his postwar poems (1946-1951): the crisis of man and the tragedy of a humanism without God. Zahradniček's prison verse is typified by both its striking theopoetic dimension, arising out of the poet's solidly Catholic faith and religious experience, and its anthropopoetic dimension: in other words, poetry being for man something fundamental, in certain circumstances vital to him and his survival, and affecting him in quite basic ways. It is a special form offreedom within one's compressed self and a special form of intensified self-awareness. The poems of Zahradniček's dark years behind bars are not only testament to religious experience in the extreme conditions of brutal totalitarian dictatorship, but also to the fact that under extreme conditions an aesthetic force becomes a force of aesthetic resistance, and to how this manifests itself.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
C - Chapter in a specialist book
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
60205 - Literary theory
Result continuities
Project
<a href="/en/project/EF16_019%2F0000734" target="_blank" >EF16_019/0000734: Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World</a><br>
Continuities
P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)<br>O - Projekt operacniho programu
Others
Publication year
2018
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Book/collection name
The Experience of Faith in Slavic Cultures and Literatures in the context of Postsecular Thought
ISBN
978-83-235-3717-5
Number of pages of the result
46
Pages from-to
198-243
Number of pages of the book
480
Publisher name
Wydawnictwa Universitetu Warszawskiego
Place of publication
Warszawa
UT code for WoS chapter
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