Milada Součková

Milada Součková (born January 24, 1898 in Prague , † February 1, 1983 in Cambridge , Massachusetts) was a Czech writer and literary theorist. She grew up in Prague, but since she did not agree with the communist regime in Czechoslovakia , she lived in the USA .

biography

Milada Součková was born in Prague on January 24, 1898. Her father was a building contractor and was involved in building new Prague districts. She grew up in a typical middle-class family after the turn of the century and experienced the pulsating life of the big city and especially the atmosphere of the strengthening middle-class class in childhood.

The writer attended the elite girls' secondary school Minerva in Prague, and greats like Milena Jesenská were her classmates. The Minerva-Gymnasium represented a space of development and freedom for the girls; the aim was not to educate them to be a housewife and mother, but to become an emancipated woman. A quarter of the graduates studied at universities, including Součková: from 1918 to 1923 she studied natural sciences in Prague. The subject of her dissertation was "O duševním životě rostlin" (On the soul life of plants) - for this she was awarded the doctorate (Dr. phil.) In 1923.

Her further life story led her away from Prague, at first voluntarily, later more or less compulsorily. From 1923 to 1924 she studied at the University of Lausanne . At some point during this time she met the painter and writer Zdeněk Rykr ; They married in 1927 (Menclová 2002: 591) or 1930 (Suda 1999: 245) - the information varies depending on the source.

She wrote for newspapers and magazines such as " Lidové noviny " (People's Newspaper), "Eva", "Kvart" (Quart), "Slovo a slovesnost" (Word and Literature). Milada Součková came into contact with Czech writers, and in 1936 she became a member of the Prague linguists' circle . Through this she and her work was influenced, especially through the friendship with the literary scholar Roman Jakobson . In Paris she worked on the revue "The Booster / Delta". Here Milada Součková met writers "who were literarily close to her, while she was a loner in the Czech literature of the time." (Suda 1999: 237).

To avoid arrest by the Gestapo , her husband committed suicide in 1940. During the Second World War she associated with the members of Skupina 42 (group 42). In 1945 she was appointed cultural attachée for the Czechoslovak consulate in New York . As one of the few, she protested publicly against the communist coup in her home country in 1948 by resigning from her position as cultural attachée. She decided to stay in the US. "Today you can hardly imagine how lonely she was." (Suda 1999: 242). This is what Kristián Suda wrote about her in his epilogue to her work "The Unknown Man".

Roman Jakobson supported her at the beginning of her career as a bohemist at several universities in the USA - he helped her to gain reputation in professional circles. From 1950 to 1962 she taught at Harvard University , from 1962 to 1969 in Chicago and from 1970 to 1973 in Berkeley , California.

Milada Součková died in Cambridge in 1983 at the age of 84 .

Create

Milada Součková wrote and published her first prose works in the 1930s . Significantly she calls her first work "První písmena" (The first letters); it is self- published in 1934 . Inspired by surrealism , she experiments with narrative styles and perspectives, also inspired by James Joyce '" Ulysses ", who uses different narrative styles in each chapter. The literary experimental character also characterizes her further work. She expresses her "aversion to literary clichés and conventional means" (Suda 1999: 235) by blurring the boundaries between past and present, constantly changing perspectives, allowing main and secondary characters to change their meaning and situations and images questions the moment she writes them down. As with James Joyce, the external events are never in the foreground, but these are combined with personal associations , ideas and memories. The narrative technique of the " stream of consciousness " finds expression in Součková's works; that is, it lets its protagonists seemingly reproduce what they have experienced freely and unfiltered. These, their characteristic properties, are also expressed in their subsequent works.

Further works, especially poems from the late 1950s, followed. Součková initially only self- publishes most of her books . As a writer, she remains largely unknown throughout her life, in the Czech Republic people are just about to discover her. She received recognition in the USA in the university sector as a literary scholar of bohemian studies . There are several reasons that she was unknown as a writer for so long: On the one hand, she protected her private life - according to her conviction that author and work should be viewed separately - and therefore little is known about her. On the other hand, first the National Socialists and later the Communists prevented advancement. In the three years in between (from 1945 to 1948), they were not appreciated in Prague and their works were not published there either. "Neznámý člověk" (The Unknown Man), for example, was first published in 1962 by an exile publisher.

plant

literature

• První písmena (The First Letters, 1934, prose volume, self-published)
• Amor a Psyche (Amor and Psyche, 1937, novel)
• Odkaz (The Legacy, 1940, Dilogy 1st part)
• Zakladatelé (The Founders, 1941, Dilogy 2nd part)
• Obrazy z dějin národa českého (pictures from the history of the Czech people, by Vladislav Vančura with the participation of Milada Součkovás, three-part, 1939, 1940, posthumously 1948, avant-garde prose)
• škola povídek (The School of Tales, 1943, volume of prose)
• Bel canto (1944, artist novel)
  • German: Bel canto , novel from the Czech and with an afterword by Eduard Schreiber, with a biographical sketch by Kristian Suda, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-88221-531-1
• Sešity Josephiny Rykrové (The Notebooks of Josephine Rykrová, 1981, in exile, married was M.Součkovás "Rykrová")
• Neznámý člověk (The Unknown Man, 1962, novel)

Literary theory / history of literature

• A Literature in Crisis: Czech Literature 1938–1950 (1954)
• The Czech Romantics (1958)
• The Parnassian Jaroslav Vrchlický (1964)
• A literary satellite. Czechoslovak-Russian Literary Relations (1970)
• Baroque in Bohemia (1980)

swell

• Menclová, Věra u. a. (Ed.): Slovník českých spisovatelů. Prague 2002: Libri.
• Schamschula, Walter: History of Czech Literature. From the founding of the republic to the present. Cologne 2004: Böhlau Verlag.
• Součková, Milada: The Unknown Man. Stuttgart 1999: German publishing company.
• Suda, Kristián: An unknown author. Unknown prose. An unknown person. Epilogue in: Milada Součková: The Unknown Man. Stuttgart 1999: German publishing company. Pp. 231-243.

see also: List of Czech writers

Web links

• Literature and other media by and about Milada Součková in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic
• Literature by and about Milada Součková in the catalog of the German National Library