2024-09-23 18:33:08
From the private archive of the German photographer Anja Walz come the images that depict the important Czech poet Ivan Diviš at the end of his life. From this Wednesday, the public can see them in the Liebieg Palace gallery, which is located in the upper center of Liberec. The exhibition will last until November 11. It is being held on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the author’s birth, which falls on this Wednesday.
The photographs were taken between 1995 and 1997. “They show views of Ivan Diviš during his encounters with people and places in Bohemia as a person full of emotions with inner desires and demons, with expectations and disappointments, with the bitterness of returning and with humility towards his native land,” he says curator Alena Brožová.
The work of a man who deeply experienced the fate of man in the contemporary world and the crisis of civilization, reads over three dozen books. From 1969 to 1997, Ivan Diviš lived in Germany, after which he returned home permanently two years before his death. Among other things, he impressed her with his implacable criticism of local conditions.
“His visits to Bohemia were accompanied by friends who helped him rediscover the Czech environment in the process of finding a home. One of them was the director Zdeněk Potužil, who brought Diviš to Český Dub, where the poet then returned repeatedly,” the curator mentions.
In České Dub in Liberecko, Diviš also met the then director of the Podještěd Museum, Tomáš Edel. Together with the Munich photographer Anja Walz, they took several trips to selected places in the Czech Republic. “Ivan Diviš visited the St. Vitus Cathedral, Ještěd or Sychrov Castle after a long time,” adds the curator. Anja Walz also documented Diviš’s move from Munich.
The prophetic Thanatea
Ivan Diviš was born in 1924 in Prague into the family of a bank clerk. During the war, he was arrested by the Gestapo as a seven-year-old and briefly imprisoned in Pečkárn and Pankrác. He later went through many occupations. He was a turner, gunsmith, leveler and inspector in factories, as well as a non-commissioned officer by profession and later an editor of several publishing houses and magazines.
He published the first piece entitled First Music of the Brothers in 1947, but an important and fruitful period for him did not come until the 1960s. At that time, as the editor of the publishing house Mladá fronta, he was in charge of young poetry and at the same time self-published the collections Deník molekuly, Morality, Eliášův foje, the especially praised Chrlení krve, V jazyk Dolor and Sursum. He often referred to himself as a great poet or prophet, among other things, referring to a dialogue with death called Thanatea, in which he predicted the Russian occupation of August 1968 more than a year in advance.
His next book, called Noe let out the crows, could not be published because of the beginning of normalization, the edition was destroyed during production at the publishing house Československý spisovatel, according to the Dictionary of Czech Literature.
In August 1969, a year after the Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, the author emigrated and settled in Munich. There he worked, among other things, at Radio Free Europe, at first as a librarian. At this time, his wife left him and returned to Bohemia with her son. Diviš then married a second time in emigration.
He once compared the fact that he was exiled from his home and his native language to a death sentence. “I didn’t like leaving and I was leaving forever. If I had known then what awaited me, I would have jumped out of the window of the train while it was moving. Ten thousand abominations and two or three beautiful things awaited me in exile,” he said in 1990.
German photographer Anja Walz at the exhibition of photographs by Ivan Diviš. | Photo: CTK
Time failed to appreciate him
It was in the 1990s that his seven-hundred-page set of reflections, notes and diary entries, The Theory of Reliability, which he wrote since 1960, became a literary sensation. It contains reflections, observations, comments, speeches, dreams, memories and reflections mostly related to poetry, faith or totality. “There can only be a mystical experience or an experience of death above the experience of emigration,” he writes here, for example.
The poet received the State Prize for Literature for this work in the mid-1990s, when there was considerable interest in diary literature. His works were published by the Torst publishing house after the revolution.
In 1997, he returned to the Czech Republic permanently, although soon after that he had to be hospitalized several times with severe depression in a psychiatric clinic. Stihl published two more works, a collection of Old Man’s Verses and poems Czechs under Huascarán, inspired by the disaster of May 1970, when 14 Czechoslovak participants in the Horozelec expedition perished after a devastating earthquake in Peru.
The recipient of the Jaroslav Seifert Exile Award from 1988 and the Medal for Merit granted to him by Václav Havel, he died unexpectedly on April 7, 1999 at the age of 74 after falling down the stairs in his apartment. He is buried in the Břevnov Cemetery in Prague under a tombstone created in 2001 by the sculptor Jan Koblasa. “Ivan Diviš was born like many other friends into a time that failed to appreciate him,” said the then Minister of Culture Pavel Dostál from the ČSSD at the unveiling of the work of art.
In 2013, literary scholar Jiří Zizler published Diviš’s monograph. In it, he identifies the exile trilogy Lamb in the Snow, Leaving Bohemia and My Eyes Had to See as the pinnacle of the author’s poetic work. It also deals with the author’s key themes: religion, since Diviš converted to Catholicism in 1964, the continuous struggle for faith in God and the relationship with the beloved and hated Czechs.
“This is the country that killed Bedřich Smetana / that nailed Karel Sabina to the wall / beat Božena Němcová to the sheets / murdered Cardinal Trocht / threw Palach into the fire / this is the country that destroys its best people,” wrote Ivan Diviš, among other things, in Moje eyes had to see. He dedicated the collection to the memory of the dissident Pavel Wonka, who was murdered by communists in 1988 after a series of cruel interrogations.
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