9.7. 1834 Jan Neruda is born

His short stories from Malostranské Street are among the gems of Czech modern prose. Jan Neruda was also at the birth of the Mayans. He was born at the beginning of July 1834.

Neruda was born into a poor family, which was not the happiest for him. On the other hand, he was praised as an artist of "working-class origin" even during socialism. "Perhaps this is why he stuck in the memory of those who otherwise slept through their literature classes," writes Marie Michlová in her book Death and Funerals of the Famous.

Neruda spent most of his childhood in Prague's Lesser Town, in the house U dvou slunců in today's Neruda Street. He had a very good relationship with his mother and lived with her until her death in 1869. Neruda's mother worked for the famous French-born palaeontologist Joachim Barrand, who became so close to Neruda that some speculate that he may even have been his father.

He came to the lifelong conviction that culture and literature were crucial to the survival and existence of the Czech nation at the Academic Gymnasium, where the famous playwright Václav Kliment Klicpera served as principal. "From the end of the 1950s Neruda made a living as a journalist. He began as an editor of a German liberal newspaper, while at the same time he gathered around him admirers of Karel Hynek Mácha, who Michlová adds, "who contributed to his almanac Máj (1858), which gave birth to the so-called Máj movement.

Neruda was otherwise a very private man, and only fell in love with two women. They were Anna Holinová and Karolína Světlá.

From the 1960s onwards, he devoted himself to various literary genres and wrote thousands of works, including poems, poems, and novels.snippets, short stories, dramas, literary and theatre reviews, and articles for the magazines Čas and Hlas or for the daily Národní listy. One of his favourite themes was social (in)equality. His first collection of poetry has a ghostly title for the subject of this book, namely Cemetery Flowers. Neruda's major works also included Songs of the Cosmos, Books of Verse, Ballads and Romances, Simply Motives and Friday Songs.

"Furthermore, his Tales of the Lesser Town are also among the gems of Czech modern prose and rightly belong to the golden fund of Czech literature. In his stories, Jan Neruda portrayed a number of peculiar characters of the inhabitants of the Lesser Town," writes Petr Urban in his book Jan Neruda: Tales of the Lesser Town.

Neruda died on 22 August 1891. According to the autopsy, he had cancer of the rectum and its subsequent perforation, which caused acute and fatal peritonitis. Neruda was fifty-seven years old. The news of his death spread very quickly. The public was informed in the Sunday morning press.

Source: Marie Michlová, Death and Funerals of the Famous, Petr Urban, Jan Neruda: Tales from the Lesser Town, www.kniznice.cz