Abstract
In my contribution, I focused on the personality of František Listopad, a Czech poet, novelist, essayist, theater and television director. This year we commemorate one hundred years since his birth and we owe him a significant revival of Czech-Portuguese cultural relations.
Listopad was a man of three names. He was born on November 26, 1921 in Prague as Jiří Synek.
He published his first short stories under this name. During World War II, he was persecuted for his Jewish origins.
However, he did not board the transport, hid with friends and was active in the resistance as a member of the illegal organization "Movement for Freedom". Due to secrecy, he changed his name to František Listopad.
He also began at this time as a poet and literary critic. After the war, he became a co-founder of the daily Mladá fronta.
After initial enthusiasm, he began to strongly criticize the communist regime, mainly for restricting human freedoms. In 1947 he was sent to Paris as the editor of the weekly Parallèle 50.
After February 1948 he was recalled, but did not return to Czechoslovakia. In the French environment, he devoted himself mainly to essay writing and began working for the emerging local television.
In 1958, at a time of strong political unrest in France, he emigrated to Portugal, where he lived until his death in 2017. Here he again chose another name, Jorge Listopad.
He considered Salazar's strong right-wing regime to be restrictive, but much freer in many ways because, for example, it did not prohibit citizens from traveling abroad. In addition to his literary work, Listopad devoted himself mainly to theatrical productions in Portugal and also became a university teacher.
He never moved to Czechoslovakia permanently, but after the revolution in 1989 he often came, presented his plays and published collections of poems and short stories. In his works with frequent existential colors, František Listopad significantly reflected life in three markedly restrictive regimes.