Name Rudolf Tesnohlidek | Role Writer | |
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Died January 12, 1928, Brno, Czech Republic Books The Cunning Little Vixen, Cunning Little Vixen | ||
Rudolf Tesnohlidek (7 June 1882 in Caslav - 12 January 1928 in Brno, suicide) was a Czech writer, poet, journalist and translator. He also used the pseudonym Arnost Bellis.
Contents
Life
He attended secondary school (gymnasium) in Hradec Kralove and later started to study Czech, history and French at university in Prague but didn't finish.
Starting in 1908, he was a contributor to the Brno newspaper Lidove noviny. His serialized novel Liska Bystrouska (Vixen Sharp Ears), written to accompany a series of drawings by Stanislav Lolek, appeared in the Lidove noviny between 7 April and 23 June 1920, was published as a book in 1921, won a state prize and achieved lasting popularity. This optimistic tale, somewhere between a children's fairy tale and adult satire, was used as the basis for Leos Janacek's opera The Cunning Little Vixen (Prihody Lisky Bystrousky, 1923).
Some of Tesnohlidek's other work reflects more pessimism and alienation than the lighthearted Vixen's tale.
His life, as interpreted by his journalistic colleague Bedrich Golombek, was a melodramatic tragedy imbued with pessimism, darkness, melancholy and decadence, a life plagued from childhood by feelings of sadness and social exclusion. In his teens, he watched helplessly as a friend drowned. When he was 21, he married Jindra Kopecka, a woman with tuberculosis. Two months after their wedding, on a holiday in Norway, she shot herself in the heart in front of him, possibly accidentally. Tesnohlidek was accused of murdering her, and had to endure two trials before being acquitted. In 1907 he moved to Brno, where he became a reporter of soudnicky (cases from the local magistrate's court) for Lidove noviny. After he had met Janacek and discussed plans for the opera based on Liska Bystrouska, he married again, but this wife left him. He married a third time. He became interested in exploring the Moravian underground caves, wrote extensively about them, and submitted his drafts for publication but found they had been heavily edited without his knowledge. On 12 January 1928, he shot himself, as his first wife had done. His third wife gassed herself to death on hearing the news.
Vixen Sharp Ears was first published in English in 1985, as The Cunning Little Vixen, with pictures by Maurice Sendak.
Shortly before Christmas 1919, Tesnohlidek and some friends were walking in the woods outside the town of Bilovice nad Svitavou a few kilometres to the north of Brno when they discovered an abandoned and in danger of freezing girl aged seventeen months. They rescued the child and took her to the police station at Bilovice. The child, subsequently named Liduska, was adopted by a family named Polakov from Brno, and lived until 1997, dying in Prague.
Work
Nenie (1902) - poetry
Dva mezi ostatnimi (Two Among Others)(1906)
Kvety v jini {Flowers in Hoarfrost)(1908)
Poseidon (1916)
Liska Bystrouska (Vixen Sharp-ears, The Cunning Little Vixen)(1920)
Kolonia Kutejsik (1922, awarded a state prize)
Pavi oko (Peacock's Eye)(1922)
Cimcirinek a chlapci (Cimcirinek and the Boys)(1922, stories for children)
Den (Day)(1923)
Vrba zelena (Green Willow)(1925)
Cvrcek na cestach (Cricket on the move)(1927)
Surovost z neznosti a jine soudnicky {The Brutality of Tenderness and Other soudnicky)(a collection of his soudnicky, published in 1982)