Iván Olbracht
(Kamil Zeman, Semily, 1882-Prague, 1952) Czech writer.The son of a writer (Antal Staek) and of a rich Jewess who converted to Catholicism, he studied law in Berlin and Prague; in this last city he also studied history.He worked in Vienna until 1916 as a translator from German and as an editor for a workers' newspaper.
In January 1920 he entered Russia illegally as a delegate of the Communist Party and participated in the Third International; upon his return he translated the Communist Manifesto.In 1926 and 1928 he was imprisoned for subversive activities.In 1929 he maintained some discrepancies with the Communist Party and left it for some time.
From 1931 to 1936 he lived in subcarpathian Russia.During the occupation and the Second World War he moved to Stribrec de Trebon and collaborated with the partisans.In 1945 he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and parliamentary, and in 1947 he was declared a "national artist".
After the first works (poems and dramas), Ivan Olbracht wrote some in prose, under the influence of Russian and Czech realism and anti-bourgeois socialist ideas.In these pieces the interesting use of other languages (German) and dialects (Prague) already appears.Progressively, the author developed his own style, with a careful choice of the lexicon and the construction of the sentences, maintaining the social and ideological intentionality, but without neglecting sincerity.The critic Václavek said of his language that it was "pure as crystal".
His most outstanding novel of the period before World War II is The strange friendship of the actor Jesenius , from 1919, a portrait of two actors: one of them vitalist, passionate and anarchic , and the other humanist, refined and moralistic.Also noteworthy is the novel Ana la proletaria , from 1928, which intelligently tells the "revolutionary" story of a maid who comes from the rural world and who moves to the Prague of the workers' struggles of 1920; this narrative is considered a classic of "socialist" literature.
His most important works, however, are the "subcarpathic": the novel Nikola suhaj, the bandit (1933), a kind of ballad of style between fantastic, realistic and social ; Mountains and centuries , from 1935, adaptation of two reports published between 1931 and 1932, which traces the historical, political, geographical, linguistic and economic panorama of subcarpathian Russia in the 1930s, in which the author incorporates the presence of an ancient and petrified nature and a great variety of races, myths and superstitions, through a fluid and brilliant prose, often interrupted by short, apodictic and paradigmatic phrases.
Golet in the valley (1937) is perhaps his masterpiece.It is made up of three tragicomic stories with a Jewish atmosphere, in which the beloved subcarpathian Russia appears as a land of great poverty, of malicious and wise men, a bit like Chagall's paintings; the best known of the three stories is The sad eyes of Hana Karadzikova .
His books also include the stories On the lonely wicked , from 1913; Happy stories from Austria and the republic , 1927 (from one of the stories, Tata , a film was made); Marika , from 1933, which was adapted into a film directed by the writer Vl.Vanura, with music by Bohuslav Martinú, and the novel Dobývatel (The Conqueror), from 1947, adapted by Prescott, which attempts to demonstrate the methodological analogies of the conquerors of the 16th and 20th centuries.
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