Eight Heads of Madness

Prepared by Radka Rubilina, this representative anthology introduces the work of Russian poet Anna Barkova (1901–1976) to Czech readers for the first time; her writing could only be gradually discovered at home and abroad after the fall of the Soviet regime. Due to her work, the author spent over twenty years of her life in Soviet gulags between 1934 and 1965, with additional years spent in exile in between.

Her writing career got off to a highly promising start. Her first poetry collection, Woman, was published as early as 1922 with a preface by Anatoly Lunacharsky, who also secured her a job at Moscow's Pravda and accommodation inside the Kremlin itself. However, her criticism of the lavish lifestyle of the Kremlin elite quickly saw her fall out of favour, and the Kremlin gates closed to her forever.

From the late 1920s, her main themes included famine, arrests, and all-pervading fear. Her later poetry, written in the camps and in exile, takes on a more intimate, reflective form, with the poet's alter ego becoming an embodiment of the entire history of Russia. From the 1950s onwards, she also reflects on the threat of a global apocalypse in the form of nuclear war.

In her prose, written mostly in exile, Barkova captures the essence of evil, debates the meaning of existence with her characters, and depicts their rootlessness and lack of freedom. Her texts express an absolute distrust of any ideology and pathos. Despite the dominance of an often hopeless pessimism, as seen in the novella Eight Heads of Madness, a Gogol-and-Chekhov-style laughter through tears also echoes in the stories The Happiness of Statistician Plachkin and Aspic.