Julius Fucík

Born Feb. 23, 1903, in Prague; died Sept. 8, 1943, in Berlin. Figure in the Czechoslovak communist movement; writer, critic, and journalist. National hero of Czechoslovakia. Member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) from 1921.

Fučík studied at the faculty of philosophy of Charles University. Beginning in the 1920’s, he helped edit such party press organs as the newspaper Rudé právo and the journal Tvorba. His sketches and reportage are outstanding examples of party publicist writing of the prewar years. His literary and critical pursuits centered on the development of the concept of socialist art.

Fučík’s book In the Country Where Our Tomorrow Is Already Yesterday (1932) and many literary sketches were devoted to the USSR, which he visited in 1930 and again from 1934 to 1936. His diverse activities during the second half of the 1930’s were imbued with the spirit of the struggle against fascism. On assignment from the party he wrote militant articles in which he called upon the people to repulse the fascist invaders; the articles were subsequently gathered together in the collection We Love Our People (1948). During the Hitlerite occupation of Czechoslovakia, he published under a pseudonym a series of patriotic articles and essays about such outstanding representatives of democratic culture as B. Nĕmcová, K. Havliček-Borovský, and J. Neruda.

In 1941, Fučík, who was then a member of the illegal Central Committee of the CPC, was put in charge of the party’s underground publications, in which his appeals to the Czech people were printed. Arrested by the Gestapo in April 1942, he was taken to Germany and executed in the summer of 1943.

In the torture chambers of the Pancrać prison Fučík wrote Reportage by a Man With a Noose Around His Neck (published 1945; Russian translation under the title A Word Before Execution, 1950; translated into 70 other languages). A literary documentary testifying to the heroism of the antifascist resistance movement fighters, the book is one of the most important works of socialist realism in Czech literature. In it Fučík summarized his thoughts on the meaning of life and on the degree to which each person may be held accountable for the fate of the world.

Fučík received the International Peace Prize posthumously in 1950. The Union of Journalists of Czechoslovakia awards a prize named in honor of Fučík.