Frantisek Halas

Born Oct. 3, 1901, in Brno; died Oct. 27, 1949, in Prague. Czech poet. Born into a family of a Communist worker.

Halaš participated in the communist youth movement and later in the antifascist movement of the intelligentsia. His collections Sepia (1927) and The Rooster Frightens Death (1930) reflected a tragic conception of life, with motifs of fatalism and death. A turn to civic problems was noted in his collection of verse Wide Open (1936). Halas’ antifascist collection Torso of Hope (1938) expressed the will of the Czech people to resist. In 1940, Halaš published a cycle of patriotic verses entitled Our Lady Božena Nĕmcová, and he wrote verses for the illegal communist newspaper Rudé Pravo. The victory over fascism was reflected in his collections The Barricade (1945) and In the Ranks (1948). Halaš translated the works of A. Mickiewicz, A. S. Pushkin, and others.