Vladimír Holan

Who was Vladimír Holan?

Vladimír Holan was a Czech poet famous for employing obscure language, dark topics and pessimist views in his poems. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in the late 1960s. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

Holan was born in Prague, but he spent most of his childhood outside the Capital. When he moved back in the 1920s he studied law and started a job as a clerk, a position that was a large source of dissatisfaction for the poet. He lost his father and in 1932 married Věra Pilařová. In the same year he published the collection of poems Vanutí, which he considered his first piece of poetic art. It was his only collection to be reviewed by the knight of Czech critics, František Xaver Šalda, who compared Holan favorably with the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé.

In the 1930s Holan continued writing obscure lyrical poetry and slowly started to express his political feelings. Political poems Odpověď Francii, Září 1938 and Zpěv tříkrálový were reactions to the situation in Czechoslovakia from September 1938 till March 1939. They also made him more intelligible and popular. The poem called Sen is a presage of a cruel war. During the war he published several poetic stories in verse inspired by national humiliation. After the war he published an apocalyptic record of events in his Panychida and chanted about the Red Army in Tobě, Rudoarmějci and Dík Sovětskému svazu. He left the Catholic Church and became a member of the Communist Party.