František Hrubín

17 September 1910, Prague – 1 March 1971, České Budějovice

František Hrubín (used the name Ivan Hrubín in his youth) spent his childhood in Lešany, where got the inspiration for many of his poems. After graduating from secondary school in 1932, he enrolled in the School of Law at but soon transferred to the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University and worked in the Central Municipal Library of Prague for two years. At the end of the Second World War, he was already writing for a living. At that time, he also moved his family to the Holešovice district of Prague and regularly visited the family cottage in Lešany. He founded the children’s magazine Mateřídouška and the children’s literature review Zlatý máj. He died shortly after a surgery of a malignant disease and was buried in the Vyšehrad cemetery in Prague.

His debut Sung from Afar (Zpíváno z dálky, 1933) made him known as a special lyricist, author of melodic poetry combining love and natural motifs, as well as motifs of evanescence and ruin. In his collections Earth After Noon (Země po polednách, 1937) and Honeycomb (Včelí plást, 1940), spirituality and symbolism is more palpable, which draw his work closer to Jan Zahradníček. During the war, he wrote his first book of poetry for children Say It with Me (Říkejte si se mnou (1943), in which he uses oral literature, primarily sayings, which Hrubín regarded as the “ancient poems for children”. In the second half of the period of occupation he wrote antifascist verses, published after the war. His lyric-epic poem Hiroshima (Hirošima, 1948) was subjected to sharp ideological critique. For a long time after that Hrubín was only allowed to publish poetry for children and translations. In the late 1950s, his epic poem Change (Proměna, 1957) appeared. It was originally written as prose and it once again introduces the themes of insecurity and threat to human existence. This narrative line is finished by Hrubín’s Romance for Flugelhorn (Romance pro křídlovku, 1962), a poem about unrequited love cinematised in 1966 by Otakar Vávra. The same director also adapted the plays An August Sunday (Srpnová needle, 1958) and Oldřich and Božena (Oldřich a Božena, 1969) into films.