Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert was born in 1901 in Žižkov, a working-class district of Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary. He left secondary school early to become a journalist and joined the Communist Party, writing for its papers. In 1920 he was among the founders of Devětsil, the avant-garde group that included Karel Teige and Vítězslav Nezval, and his first collection, City in Tears (1921), was proletarian poetry of social protest. Within a few years he had moved to Poetism, the group’s own playful, cosmopolitan manner, in collections such as On the Waves of TSF (1925).

In 1929 he left the Communist Party with six other writers in protest at its Stalinist course, and worked through the 1930s and 1940s as a journalist for the social-democratic and trade-union press. His poetry grew simpler and more musical, centred on Prague, on women and love, and on memory, while the occupation drew from him poems of national grief. After 1949 he devoted himself to literature; his gentle, unideological verse was sometimes attacked by official critics, yet collections such as Mother (1954) were widely loved. He was named National Artist in 1967.

During the Prague Spring he chaired the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, and in 1977 he signed Charter 77. Late books such as The Casting of Bells and An Umbrella from Piccadilly show him at his most candid and wry, and his memoir All the Beauties of the World appeared abroad. He was the first Czech writer to receive the Nobel Prize; too ill to travel in 1984, he was represented in Stockholm by his daughter, while the state media barely mentioned the award. He died in Prague in 1986.