Miloš Doležal at the Visegrad Literary Residency

Between September and November, Bratislava welcomes four recipients of the Visegrad Literary Residency.  

 

Miloš Doležal, a poet, writer, documentarist and journalist representing the Czech literary scene is the second Visegrad resident we would like to introduce here.  From 1991 to 1993, he worked as an editor of the monthly Perspektiv and as an assistant writer in the theatre Divadlo za branou II. From 1998 to 2018, he was an editor and author at Radio Vltava. As a screenwriter, he collaborates with the Czech television on a historical documentary series. His texts are published in the magazines KontextyPerspektiv and Reportér. His poems have been published in French, German, English, Croatian, Greek and Italian translation. He is the author of several history books and poetry collections. As a co-author, he curated numerous exhibitions dedicated to the crimes of communism in Czechoslovakia. 

He is the author and co-author of many radio plays and documents dealing with the topics of WWII and the communist reppressions of the 1950's. He also prepares literary programs, portraits of personalities and travel series. He has been occupied with priest Jozef Toufar, a victim of the communist regime, for a long time. He initiated the exhumation of his remains from a mass grave and the funeral in his home parish in Vysočina.

 

In the past years, he has been working on a tetralogy, a book documentary series of stories taking place between 1938 and 1990. The first two volumes have already been published: Čurda z hlíny: Tři dokumentární povídky z protektorátu (2019, Host) and Do posledních sil: Tři dokumentární povídky z konce protektorátu (2020, Host). 

He is currently preparing material for the publication of parts III and IV. The third volume will focus on summer and fall of 1945, when new political rules were installed in Czechoslovakia, after which the Sudeten Germans were cast out, people were falsely accused of collaboration and violent nationalism arose. The fourth part will be dedicated to stories from the 50's and 60's and it will depict the lives of different characters from that era. 

During the Visegrad literary residency, Miloš Doležal is collecting archival material connected to these stories, e.g. in the Slovak prison of Leopoldov, in archives and in meetings with professionals, historians and contemporaries.