Wild Hunt

The first part of the Šumava trilogy: 1. Wild Hunt /KANT2022/ 2. Journey elsewhere /KANT 2021/ 3. Death of the Barbed Snake /KANT 2026/ The Wild Hunt is one of the dark legends of the Sumava Mountains, but also of old Europe. A raid of frenzied driving of demonic beings and phantoms that appear in storms and tempests, dashing across the sky or the earth, terrifying and destroying everything in their path. It's a wild chase. Perhaps they are a group of hunters who died in the hunt, or perhaps they are the cursed souls of the undead serving time for their war crimes against the innocent inhabitants of the mountains. And that countless armies have crossed the mountainsides over the centuries. For their evil deeds they are condemned by the gods to eternal suffering in the form of endless battles. Perhaps that is why the Wild Hunt is called the Red Riders in Šumava. This fascinating legend dates back to the earliest Germanic times. The first written mention of belief in a phantom wild hunt dates back centuries. After the February 1948 communist putsch, not only Šumava, but the entire Czech society was dominated by the modern equivalent of the Wild Hunt. Perhaps Albrecht Dürer, had he lived in the time of nascent communism in our territory, would have carved into wood instead of his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse other faces and other attributes of the horsemen who brought social ruin and moral destruction to the Czech lands for decades to come. In the novel Wild Hunt, the reader finds himself in the Šumava landscape around Svatý Tomáš and the ruins of Vítkov Castle in the area of the later Lipno Dam. It's 1951, a time after the expulsion of most of the native, German-speaking population, when dozens of abandoned villages and towns with their churches disappeared from the borderlands, schools, shops and pubs. In the atmosphere of destruction of this centuries-old memory of the Šumava landscape, bright (communist) tomorrows were "built", including the deadly Iron Curtain. The dramatic story of the novel opens up the dark history of the Šumava Mountains through the unexpected experiences of a summer brigade of budding university students right at the state border during the so-called "Šumava War". wagoning the borderlands. What could be dismantled and reused from former German and Austrian municipalities was sent to the interior as building material. What could not be sent was blown up and disappeared. The clash between the hopes and ideals of young people and the brutal reality of the emerging communism in Czechoslovakia not only reminds us of the difficult and tragic moments of our recent history, but also allows us to understand the present in different contexts. The story of The Wild Hunt is not based on a true story. However, its individual micro-situations reflect the reality of the time; perhaps in other places, at other times and with other actors. Any similarity between the characters is purely coincidental. The book Wild Hunt won the first prize of the international literary competition Šumava litera in 2023. The cover uses a detail of a painting by Tomáš Císařovský.