Provázanost díla Josefa Hiršala a Josefa Honyse
Connections in the Work of Josef Hiršal and Josef Honys

Summary/Abstract: This paper compares the work of Josef Hiršal and Josef Honys over three separate periods. In the first period they were young enthusiasts for literature whose work was influenced by Surrealism. It was a source from which they both drew, but with different interpretations. The next period includes the post-war years, especially the 1950s, when the paths of the two authors diverged. Whereas Hiršal began to publish and his name gradually became better known, Honys closed into himself, although he did not stop writing. The political conditions of the 1950s, however, did not allow the public presentation of his work. The third period, including the first half of the 1960s, and up to Honys’s death in 1969, was crucial. It was a period of more relaxed political conditions, when the two authors joined the activities of the Křižovatka (Crossroads) group and published and exhibited together; whether at the exhibition in Kolín, where Honys debated, or exhibitions abroad (Triest, Venice, Paris, Buenos Aires). While Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová focused on the literary field, on language as such and on its various modifications, Josef Honys found the focal point of his work chiefly in the visual field where he made use essentially of the same principles as in literature. In the field of poetry he, like Hiršal, concentrated on the issue of language and its non-traditional use. The paper discusses not only the literary activity of the two authors and the way they influenced each other, but also Honys’s work in the visual arts which was thoroughly untraditional for its time and very progressive.

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