Jirí Taufer

Born July 5, 1911, in Boskovice. Czech poet. People’s Artist of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1975). Member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia since 1930.

Taufer studied at the faculty of law of the University of Brno. In 1935 he helped found U-Block, a society of Czechoslovak writers adhering to socialist realism. Taufer’s first poetry collection was Evening Eyes (1928). His collections Check and Mate, Europe (1933), X-rays (1938), and Sonnets (1961) and his narrative poem Farewell, USSR (1935) attacked imperialist wars, fascism, and the bourgeois order and expressed faith in the victory of the proletariat.

Taufer’s multithematic works are replete with poetic associations. A number of his poems are devoted to the Soviet Union, for example, the narrative poems A Heroic Spirit (1957) and The Theme Is Memory (1966; Russian translation, 1970) and the poems in the collection Chronicle (1958; Russian translation, 1961). Taufer also wrote the memoirs The Party, the People, the Generations (1962) and essays on S. K. Neumann, B. Václavek, and V. Nezval. He translated many of V. V. Mayakovsky’s works into Czech. Taufer received the State Prize of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in 1974.