author
Petr Bezruč
1867–1958
A fiercely original Czech poet who turned the struggles of Silesia into some of the most memorable verse in Czech literature. Writing under a pen name, he is best known for the passionate, socially charged collection Silesian Songs.
1 Audiobook
Songs of the Slav : Translations from the Czecho-Slovak
by Petr Bezruč, Svatopluk Čech, Vítězslav Hálek, Ján Kollár, J. S. Machar
About the author
Born Vladimír Vašek in Opava on September 15, 1867, he wrote under the name Petr Bezruč and became one of the most distinctive voices in Czech poetry. He was closely linked with Austrian Silesia, the borderland region whose hardships, language tensions, and working people shaped his writing.
His reputation rests above all on Silesian Songs, a group of poems first published around 1899–1900 and later gathered into book form. The collection gave powerful expression to social injustice and national feeling, and it secured his place as a major Czech poet.
Outside literature, he worked for many years as a postal official in Moravia before retiring in the late 1920s. He lived a long life, dying on February 17, 1958, and remains remembered for the intensity, moral force, and regional identity of his poetry.