Marek Švehla: The Magician and his Time

The year is 1960 and in Humpolec in the Highlands lives a sixteen-year-old shaven-headed young man who is strikingly different from his surroundings. Dressed in black corduroys and a turtleneck, he sets off with a typewriter in a bag to a secluded spot where he tirelessly transcribes the works of the world's literary classics. Almost the entire works of Kafka, for example. Ivan Martin Jirous, who later became a drunkard, troublemaker and acclaimed poet, entered the scene in the 1960s as an unusually intelligent, talented young man. His interest in literature, visual arts and music developed after the advent of normalisation in the 1970s, when he became the initiator and ideological leader of the Czech cultural underground, an original subculture seeking a free space in an environment of constant state control. From his position as manager of the legendary Plastic People of the Universe, he came into inevitable conflict with the secret police and the communist judiciary. Not only Charter 77 was shaped by it, but also Jirous' personal story of courage and determination, one of the most remarkable in our modern history. Schwehl's biography tells this story in great detail and in the context of the time in which it took place. The recording, divided into ten parts, presents a cross-section of the book and constitutes about a tenth of its entire scope.