Hella

Alena Machoninová

Hella. The subtitle of the narrative essay debut by the Russian scholar and translator Alena Machoninová refers to the thematic basis of the narrative-essay, that is the life-story of Helena „Hella“ Frischer, a Czech Jewess who served as a model for the character of in the novel Moscow-Border by Jiří Weil. Allegedly, Hella had been executed along with her husband during the Great Terror under Stalin. However, a few years ago it turned out that after having served ten years at a labor camp in northern Russia Hella was set free and then lived in Moscow until her death in 1984. In 2017 her labor camp memoir came out in Czech.

Literární reportáže

Alena Wagnerová


Literary Reportage. The writer, editor and oral historian Alena Wagnerová has been involved in the significant genre of literary reportage for more than 50 years. The collection selected by the Maraton publishing house comprises the best of her texts written in 1965–2016, i.e. both texts published in magazines in the Czech Republic, Germany and Switzerland, and those that could not be published in the late-1960s Czechoslovakia due to political reasons.

A lampa ještě hořela

Iva Tajovská


The Little Lamp Was Burning Still. Oldřiška, the narrator of Iva Tajovská’s new novel, takes us from the beginning of the 20th century through to the summer of 1972 when the demolition of the famous Veselka Hotel in Pardubice symbolically completed her life story. As a result of her troubled family circumstances and her platonic love, she spent her youth and adulthood in loneliness and seclusion, which made her all the more sensitive to the fates of others.

Než se rozdělíme

Iva Tajovská


Before We Part. Iva Tajovská’s new novel draws from the events of the 1990s and deals with the disintegration of states and families that occurred during the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the civil war in Yugoslavia. In this strong and straightforward story the characters are confronted with loneliness, aging and alienation in times that were supposed to be peaceful, but instead brought new guilts and rages.

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