Hora, Josef

Born July 8, 1891, in Dobrzyn, near Roud-nice; died June 21, 1945, in Prague. Czech poet. People’s Artist of Czechoslovakia (1945, posthumously).

Hora’s first collection was Poems (1915). His socialist convictions took shape in the early 1920’s; in 1921, he became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC). His poems of those years are characterized by social protest. In his publicistic work, the poet supported proletarian art. In 1924 and 1925 he visited Italy and the USSR; his impressions from these travels are reflected in the collections Italy (1925) and Strings in the Wind (1927). At the end of the 1920’s, the subjective lyrical principle in Hora’s poetry became stronger. At this time Hora underwent an ideological crisis and quit the CPC (1929). Hora’s inclination to abstract philosophical musings of a mystical sort and seekings after the meaning of a bygone time appear in the poetry collections of the 1930’s, but social motifs sound as well. Hora’s poems of 1938 to 1945 express lofty patriotic feelings and convey the tragic experiences of those years. Hora’s novels include Socialist Hope (1922), Clay Babylon (1922; Russian translation, 1928), Lean Year (1926; Russian translation, 1929), and Breath on the Pane (1938); he translated A. S. Pushkin (Evgenii Onegin), S. A. Esenin, and B. L. Pasternak.