A novel about the life of the scholar, man of letters, priest and educator Bohuslav Balbín (1621–1688)

Literary fiction

Stanislav Komárek chose an unusual subject for his fourth novel: Bohuslav Balbín. This versatile Baroque intellectual, historian and hagiographer, teacher and writer, who was a defender and promoter of the Czech language long before the National Revival of the 18th and 19th centuries, has quite a lot in common with Komárek. This is probably the first reason why the author’s latest work of prose is so successful: Komárek has a genuine fondness for his character and considers Balbín his partner. And so the period following the Battle of White Mountain, often referred to as an age of darkness, is suddenly an age of light. An era when things were happening; when people were suffering from terrible poverty and the pain and destruction of war but at the same time great strides were being made in language, education, culture and history. And since Komárek is writing a work of fiction, he creatively develops a number of motifs in his own way: Balbín the forerunner of the Scout movement, Balbín the rambler, Balbín the practitioner of homoeroticism. And always with narrative gusto and verve, always with a flair for comical language and situations, with an inventive metaphor at virtually every turn. This is the second reason why his novel works so well. And the third reason is the author’s natural ability to span borders or bring together different threads, whether in terms of geography (from exile in Austria to years spent wandering the globe), disciplines (from Darwin to Jung) or genres (a writer of lyric poetry, epic poetry and drama in one). With all of this under one roof, the Jesuit Balbinus, who has been dead for more than four hundred years, suddenly comes alive.