Miloš Doležal’s Poetic Tribute to His Late Wife Wins Book of the Year Award

Jana Franková, artistic director of Disman’s radio children’s ensemble, she died the year before last from a stroke at the age of 54. And the writer Miloš Doležal, who lived with her for almost three decades, experienced months of hopelessness. He wrote a collection of poetry about them called Jana will soon collect a linden flower, which won an award this Monday evening Magnesia Litera for book of the year.

The results were announced at the New Stage of the National Theater in Prague. The award for prose goes to Viktor Špaček’s collection of short stories about losers, in the journalistic category ethnologist Martin Rychlík won with his History of People, which presents an overview of diversity, yet shows how much we are the same despite all our differences. Other Letters were taken over by the poet Petr Hruška or the publishing house Torst for three decades of publishing the writings of Jan Zábrana. The organizers announced the winners of the new genre awards a day in advance.

The fifty-two-year-old poet and radio documentarian Miloš Doležal, known to the wider public thanks to the monograph of Father Josef Toufar or the stories of fighters against Nazism and communism, dominated the main category. In it, the laureates are chosen by almost two hundred booksellers, editors or writers. And they rarely agree on a poet. Since the founding of today’s best-known literary prizes at the turn of the millennium, poetry has become the book of the year only once: in 2009, Bohumila Grögerová succeeded with a collection recording the loss of sight of someone who had read all his life and whose blindness deprives him of his last contact with the world. They were also, albeit in a different way, intensely personal poems about loss and transience, as in the case of Miloš Doležal.

His dirge for his wife sometimes turns into a love lyric. He freely develops the genre of funeral poetry, verses for the dead, which has existed since ancient times, although Doležal’s style and mild, even prayerful tone is more similar to Czech Christian poets.

In the case of such a tragic material, however, the reader is reluctant to compare. The book clearly had a function other than to be measured or to compete. Her writing helped Doležal survive months of borderline shock and find meaning again in a life that was torn apart from day to day. “You put a double nelson on me, Lord / First mother and father and now you take a faithful wife, what else will you take from the flesh of my soul?” he asks in the collection.

It takes place around the family estate in Vysočina, where the writer comes from and where he and his wife lived. Dramaturgically, the book spans from their wedding in 1994 through the wife’s sudden death, memories of her or her dreams, to conversations with God and a sort of conclusion. “I tried to record the situation in such a state of delirium, fever or madness. Not from a distance, but directly in those days,” Doležal said last month in Prague’s Havel Library. “For me, it wasn’t therapy, it was more of a call and an opportunity to at least capture something, to counter that passing away,” he added.

The metaphor from the title John will soon gather the linden flower refers to the situation when the author is harvesting the fruits sown by his wife in the garden. It was in June, when she died, that she routinely collected linden flowers. “Today, Jana’s garden will be sprinkled with rain / what she planted is already budding, blooming, bearing fruit,” Doležal writes in mostly free verse, as “I accept every strawberry as a guest from you / as a kiss and a whisper / I eat pods, arugula, basil and zucchini / whole summer you give me”.

Miloš Doležal, who until last year was preparing historical podcast for Aktuálně.cz, is the author of more than twenty books. He has been publishing poetry since the mid-90s of the last century, and he even managed to get feedback from the critic Andrej Stankovič or the artist Jiří Kolář. Before long, he will see a committee from a work called The Thorn of the Stingray. His winning collection, published by Revolver Revue, is already sold out again in most bookstores despite a recent reprint. You can familiarize yourself with the part using radio committeein which the author himself, a long-time radio editor, took part with editor Jan Wiendl.

So poetry succeeded a second time. However, an unprecedented event was added to the results of Magnesia Litera this Monday. The award was won by a Roma author for the first time. Forty-one-year-old journalist Patrik Banga succeeded in the Debut of the Year category thanks to his autobiographical book The Real Way Out. Although the title refers to the film, in some respects it follows the current trend of Czech culture going back to the 90s of the last century: from the crime series Devadesátky to the production of Discoland to the upcoming continuation of the miniseries Iveta.

However, in the book, Banga describes a radically different “90s”, a time when “a digger was synonymous with Roma” and the local education system sent Roma children to special schools, thereby depriving an entire generation of opportunities.

The narrator, as a poor young man mainly in Žižkov, Prague, experiences racism, violence, police brutality and systematic discrimination to an extent unimaginable for a white person. The more mature he is, the more resistance he has to overcome. The teachers and social workers have been discouraging him from studying since he was a child, because as a Roma he is said to grow up to be a criminal anyway. Some children are friends with him, but others already feel a sense of racial superiority. At first, Banga is rejected by a girl every now and then because of the color of her skin. When he gets on the tram, the inspectors follow him straight.

The drug store sometimes refuses to sell him cigarettes. Then they won’t let him into a white-only establishment. In the first job, he takes several times less than white. The doctor automatically suspects him of addiction during the examination. In the supermarket, they check it at one point after every purchase, and even if they pay, the skinheads from security end up handing it to them in the back room, after which the attacked author ends up at the police. For long hours tied to the heater or a bench with his hands behind his back, repeatedly slapped, automatically guilty in all circumstances. Once the law enforcement officers beat him brutally until he ends up with a concussion, the second time they even kidnap him outside the city.

Despite everything, Banga, constantly disadvantaged, gradually works his way up from carrot seller, car washer and aid worker to journalist, but the scars remain. And society offers him only one ideal all the time: to constantly equalize with whites who had starting lines elsewhere.

“I was arrested twenty-seven times, the first time I stood trial when I was fifteen and a week old,” Banga recounted last month at Havel’s library. “We idealize the 1990s, we tend to see it as good, moral role models like Václav Havel and the fact that freedom appeared. At the same time, however, Roma and Vietnamese began to be the target of extremist groups. I thought it was right to record this,” he explained in the book, which he wrote already at the turn of the millennium, but he only published it at the end of last year.

He tells in a raw, reportage style. When he indicts the Czech education system or explains the mass eviction of hundreds of Roma families from Prague to the north in the late 1990s, he writes with almost journalistic overtones.

In recent years, the term autofiction has been used for similar books, but it is more suitable for the artistic prose of authors such as Frenchman Édouard Louis or Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. Patrik Banga created a pivotal documentary about the times, the change in people’s behavior after 1989, generally about otherness in a homogeneous environment. Shortly after a strong literary testimony also came out Olga Fečová, which Iveta Kokyová spoke at the Writers’ Convention and which after ten years of existence penetrates into the wider awareness of the Roma publishing house Kher, is perhaps at least a small reason for optimism. Perhaps such books will one day receive Letters regularly.