Jaroslav Durych

2 December 1886, Hradec Králové – 7 April 1962, Prague

After his mother’s death, Jaroslav Durych lived with his grandmother in Hradec Králové. After five years of attending the grammar school, he was expelled because he read Ernest Renan. He finished the school, however, graduating in 1906. When he graduated from the medical faculty in Prague, he worked as an army physician in Vienna, followed by Uzhgorod, Olomouc and from the late 1938 Prague. He edited the Catholic-oriented magazines Rozmach (1923–1927) and Akord in its first phase (1928–1933). In the second half of the 1930s, he held right-wing views, which is why he was banned from publishing after the war. His works were not published again until the late 1950s. He permanently settled in Prague before the war and he died there as well.

After his first verses in the early 1920s, Durych stopped writing for a longer period of time. His following works were about perceiving the world as a part of an order that human will cannot influence. The motifs of death and decay are omnipresent, which brings his works close to Baroque literature. Course naturalism combined with motifs of humility, poverty and resistance against the middle-class world appear in collections Three Ducats (Tři dukáty, 1919), Images (Obrazy, 1922) and Three Threepennies (Tři troníčky, 1923). He set his Wallenstein trilogy The Descent of the Idol (Bloudění, 1929), which also includes the collection of three stories Requiem: The Smaller Wallenstein Trilogy (Rekviem: Menší Valdštejnská trilogie, 1930), into the Thirty Years’ War. After the war, he returned to themes of poverty and cleanliness in Soul and Star (Duše a hvězda, 1969), God’s Rainbow (Boží duha, 1969), etc. He also wrote his memoirs and philosophical essays, as well as theatre plays from the history of religion, reminiscent of Spanish Baroque.