Radio Prague has a conversation with Eva Kalivodova on Bozena Nemcova — the mother of Czech writing, according to my good buddy Milan Kundera.
And today, with me to discuss Bozena Nemcova is Eva Kalivodova, who teaches at Charles University's Institute of Translation Studies and has also worked with the recently founded Centre for Gender Studies at the university. I'd like to talk specifically today about her classic work "Babicka", this book which I think every Czech knows, though maybe not many of them as adults. Why is it such a classic, and really the question I want us to look at today is - is it still worth reading?Bozena NemcovaEva Kalivodova: "It's definitely still worth reading, but maybe it's good to re-read it as adults, not as children. Then we can appreciate it better. If we consider this book we should realize that Czech literature, unlike for instance English literature in the mid 19th century, did not have a novel at that time. What did exist at that time was the short story, but among many of them it had problems with schematic plots, that were often shaped by Czech nationalist ideologies of the time and by didacticism. And Nemcova avoided these dangers by using a mode of remembering. Nemcova ingeniously used the language means of an oral narrative. It means the rhythm of spoken sentences and even the vocabulary must have sounded very authentic, not the artificial intellectual language that the Czech intellectuals in Prague tried to invent. This was authentic."
I'd like to look more closely at some of the characters. There are very many strong female characters in the story of the Babicka who brings such harmony to the lives of all she encounters. So I'd like to read a few lines about one of the most interesting of the characters,
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