Petr Bezruč

Petr Bezruč (born Sept. 15, 1867, Opava, Silesia, Austrian Empire [now in Czech Republic]—died Feb. 17, 1958, Olomouc, Czech.) was one of the finest and most individual Czech poets.

Bezruč studied in Prague and became a postal official in Moravia until his retirement in 1928. His literary reputation rests on a remarkable series of poems written during 1899 and 1900 and published in the periodical Čas between 1899 and 1903. The subject of almost all these poems is the people of Czech Silesia, whom Bezruč saw as a dying race, doomed to denationalization at the hands of German industrialists and Polish priests. From this local theme he created a poetry of national and, indeed, universal validity. The 31 poems of the Silesian issue of Čas (1903) had swelled to 88 by the last edition of the collected Slezské písně (1956; “Silesian Songs”).