The paper provides a brief analysis of three articles written by Jana Krejcarová in the years 1946–1947 (her oldest known texts, published in book form for the first time in 2016), attempts to place them into the context of other work by Krejcarová-Černá and compares them with texts produced by her mother, Milena Jesenská.
The article deals with two prominent representations of the mother in Jana Krejcarová’s written production: first Milena Jesenská’s portrait in Jana’s biography of her mother, Adresát Milena Jesenská [Addressee Milena Jesenská] (1969) — and secondly the character of Petr’s mother in the short novel Hrdinství je povinné [Heroism is compulsory] (1964), a fictional story with an apparent autobiographicbackground. The study shows that both representations are based on the child’s ambivalent attitude toward its mother: the analysis works on the hypothesis that the topic of social engagement is in both texts at the very core of this ambivalence. Public commitment is both for Jana as a biographer and for her fictional character Petr a reason for admiring the mother on the one hand and a great emotional and ethic challenge on the other hand — for the child is jealous of the mother’s social engagement and considers it as the very force not only keeping her away from him but also causing, eventually, her death. Moreover, the child feels split, becoming an adult, between the perspective to be as socially engaged, or even heroic, as the mother — and the refusal of a behaviour that seems to give priority to the social rather than to private sphere. Indeed, this ambivalence in the child-mother-relationship brands a depiction of the mother which is as subtly nuanced as emotionally and ethically demanding.
Even though the anthology Jewish Names, often called the beginning of Czech alternative culture, was published in 1995, several central questions concerning this seminal collection from the early 1950s remain unclear: Who initiated it, when was it assembled, and what is its connection with the causa of the ‘Trotzkyites’ in Prague and later anti-semitic show trials? Answers can be found if one appreciates the pivotal role of Honza Krejcarová in this unique project. The article connects dots between Czech history during the Protectorate when young Honza witnessed her mother Milena Jesenská’s resistance activities, and the late 1940s of Stalinist Czechoslovakia when the State Security started surveilling and persecuting Krejcarová. Based on archival studies the article argues for the parallelism between secret service practices (interrogation, the revealing of names in the form of denunciation) and automatic surrealist writing techniques. Drawing on the example of the name of the Author it analyses the paratextual structure of the anthology connected to its literary models, mainly from France. Jewish Names is a rich collection of fictitious ‘Jewish’ pseudonyms attributed to real Czech writers, stressing the vulnerability of the literary intelligentsia, their mineurité. And it is this paratextual construction which can be considered as the most daring and auto-referential aspect of this illegal publishing project. The article reveals problematic aspects of the chosen path of pseudonymy and anonymity. Changing or omitting one’s name is a common trait of female biographies, complicating the attribution of authorship. The article shows how pseudonymy takes its toll on an existential, gender, political, and historical level — precluding until today the proper names from entering Czech literary history.
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