Plague in Athens (Mor v Athénách)

Abstract

About the Author: Jiří Kolář (1914–2002) was a graphic artist, poet, essayist and translator. He came from Kladno, and he called himself “a simple worker”. He started his creative career in the early 1930s with surrealist poems, later belonged to the left-oriented artistic and literary Group 42. Due to the Communist coup in 1948, he was banned from 1949 to 1957. In 1950, he wrote one of his substantive books of poetry → The Liver of Prometheus. He spent eight months in prison in 1953 for this “subversive manuscript”. For which, among others, he used the text by the Czech writer Ladislav Klíma and the short story By the Railway Track (→Medallions) by Zofia Nałkowska. At the end of 1950s, he gradually concentrated on artistic work and visual experiments. His visual poetry and collages won him world fame with dozens of exhibitions. His entire work was exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1975 and in other major Western museums of modern art. In the 1970s and 1980s, again, he could not publish except in samizdat or exile. In 1977, Kolář signed the human rights manifesto Charter 77 and while on a scholarship in West Berlin, the Czechoslovak government decided to force him to emigrate with no permission to return. He lived in Paris from 1980 to 1989, and afterwards he regularly travelled between Paris and Prague. From the late 1990s, due to his declining health, he stayed in Prague and spent his last years in a Prague hospital.