2024-09-02 09:25:31
Several books on Czech literature of the 19th century were written by the literary historian Jaroslava Janáčková, who died this Friday in Prague. She was 94 years old. Her son, literary critic and historian Pavel Janáček, informed about the death.
Charles University professor Jaroslava Janáčková was one of the members of the publishing collective Božena Němcová’s Correspondence and Karel Havlíček’s Correspondence, or co-authors of the handbook Czech literature from the beginning to today.
Among her significant achievements was the editing of a three-volume edition of Božena Němcová’s own and accepted correspondence, the final volume of which was published at the end of 2006. It presents letters between the writer and her children, letters with Josef Němcová, her sister and Václav Čeňek Bendl from 1857 and 1858.
Janáčková stated at the time that Němcová’s letters are a kind of chronicle of the family of the time when the mother no longer gave birth to children from a certain point. Němcová had been ill since the birth of her fourth child, probably suffering from a gynecological disease, as a result of which she died prematurely.
Jaroslava Janáčková was born on November 24, 1930 in Havlíčková Borová. After graduating from the Chotěbor grammar school, she studied Czech and Russian in Prague at the Pedagogical and then the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University.
This became her academic home, where she taught for more than thirty years. Even as an emeritus member of the local academic community, practically until the end of her life, she collaborated with her former students on thinking through methods for publishing and interpreting correspondence as a unique form of written dialogue.
Professionally, she was mainly interested in the artistic prose of the second half of the 19th century, the era from romanticism to modernism. She focused on the work of authors such as Alois Jirásek, Jakub Arbes and Gabriela Preissová. In addition to great writers and works, she also paid attention to popular reading books, popular fiction, publishing operations, readers and reading.
She had to leave the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in the late normalization years. When she returned there after November 1989, she turned her and her students’ attention to the founding figures of modern Czech literature, especially Němcová, to whose grandmother she dedicated a book study The Story of Mysterious Writing.
Janáčková attended hundreds of lectures for the public, collaborated, even as the initiator of various projects, with radio creators, theater artists and filmmakers.