Jan Palach w czeskiej poezji

JAN PALACH IN THE CZECH POETRY The article will tackle the analysis of lyrical pieces dedicated to Jan Palach. From the extensive material, including inter alia Kazimierz Wierzyński’spoem’Naśmierć Jana Palacha w Pradze’ recited at the radio station of Radio Free Europe, or the piece written by a popular Bulgarian poet Valery Petrov, entitled ‘Self-immolation’. I select only those works which were created in Czechoslovakia right after Jan Palach had committed self-immolation. Firstly, the reason for such a selection is mostly that they were composed shortly after Palach’s setting himself on fire and were written by Czech and Slovakian poets committed emotionally to the dramatic political suicide of a young Prague student and directly experiencing the events of January 1969. As a consequence, the following works remain in my interest: Miroslav Holub’s ‘Praha Jana Palacha’ and Josef Kainar’s ‘Bolestať mi poví’, published in the weekly of the Association of Czechoslovakian Writers ‘Letters’ on 23rd January 1969, Jan Skácel’s ‘Hořícíkeř’, as well as the poem by PavolHorov (born PavolHorovčák) ‘Malérekviemza Jana Palacha a iných’, both of them were also published in ‘Letters’ journal, accordingly on 6th and 13th February, and the poem written on 30th January 1969 by Jan Zábrana, entitled ‘První (Noc v Tatrách)’ . The works which I do not include in my considerations are the poems written by Jan Palach’s copycat, Jana Zajíc’s ‘JanuPalachovi’ and ‘Poslední’, because, despite their literary value, they were not initially intended for publishing. Zajíc wrote them only for himself and probably, if he had not committed self-immolation, they would not have been published until today. In the works referred to above, I am mainly interested in the manners of articulating the heroization of Jan Palach and his act. Indeed, these poems constitute the part of heroic discourse, they create heroic narration and present the self-immolated in the glory as an indisputable hero.