Vyprávění o Bedřichu Fučíkovi
Talking about Bedřich Fučík

Summary/Abstract: Sak, Robert. “Život na vidrholci”: Příběh Bedřicha Fučíka. Prague and Litomyšl: Paseka, 2004, 424 pp. Sak’s work, which borrows its title from an essay about the same man by Václav Havel, is the fi rst biography in book form about Bedřich Fučík (1900–1984), a Roman Catholic intellectual, and a leading literary historian and critic. In the 1930s, Fučík was the successful director of the Melantrich publishing house. In the 1950s, he spent many years in prison. During the 1970s and 1980s he was driven into the underground culture of samizdat. The reviewer praises the biographer’s insight into the history of publishing in interwar Czechoslovakia and his description of Fučík’s trial and imprisonment. On the whole, however, he reproaches Sak for a simplistic orientation to literary history, a failure to provide a more profound judgement of his own, and a frequently insensitive paraphrasing of Fučík’s writing.

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