Penziopolis

In a letter addressed to Josef Rybák, Jiří Vogl recalls the Písek of his childhood and youth in the 1920s and 1930s. It depicts a lively city with a distinctive population and a unique atmosphere. His engaging and poetic style, spiced with irony and humour, made the memoir - already a unique document - a remarkable literary work.
Petr Mano almost fifty years after its creation, he was so enchanted by it that he decided to write back to Jiří Vogl and describe the same city as he had known it from the 1980s to the present.

When the houses around the river turned to rubble in one year, the rats disappeared with them. The speed with which they got lost surprised everyone. We used to crawl through the ruins as boys, but I don't remember seeing any. But among the bare, cracked walls, still decorated with wallpaper of dusty rolls and stencils, we could hear the occasional quiet voice of those who had lived and died in the street. Kašpar, the hairdresser, Kubišta, the old trumpet player, Fik, the drunkard, or Otýlia Šnoblochová, who taught piano lessons in the afternoon. The lonely notes, plucked in the sweat of the face by the child's fingers from the long keyboard, flew over the river like little gulls catching insects.