"Priests in prisons": Religious Experience in Extreme Circumstances - the Theopoetics of Jan Zahradníček's (1951-1960) Poem Written behind Bars
Abstract
In April and July 1952 Brno and Prague were the scenes of show trials of alleged "agents in the service of the Vatican and the USA", contrived by the Communist state security apparatus to dispose of opposition Catholic intellectuals and writers. The trials ended with one death penalty, one sentence of life imprisonment and long prison sentences of seven to twenty-five years.
Those convicted included one of the most striking exponents of 1930s and 1940s modern Czech verse, Jan Zahradniček (1905-1960), who was jailed for thirteen years. In the extreme conditions of incarceration Zahradniček never stopped writing poetry, or rather reciting it to his fellow-inmates, who learned the poems by heart.
On his release from prison under the general amnesty of May 1960 Zahradniček - in the five months of life left to him - reconstructed the poems. This essay focuses on the theopoetics of his prison poems which picked up on the main topic of his postwar poems (1946-1951): the crisis of man and the tragedy of a humanism without God.
Zahradniček's prison verse is typified by both its striking theopoetic dimension, arising out of the poet's solidly Catholic faith and religious experience, and its anthropopoetic dimension: in other words, poetry being for man something fundamental, in certain circumstances vital to him and his survival, and affecting him in quite basic ways. It is a special form offreedom within one's compressed self and a special form of intensified self-awareness.
The poems of Zahradniček's dark years behind bars are not only testament to religious experience in the extreme conditions of brutal totalitarian dictatorship, but also to the fact that under extreme conditions an aesthetic force becomes a force of aesthetic resistance, and to how this manifests itself.