Frantisek Kubka

Born Mar. 4, 1894, in Prague; died there Jan. 7, 1969. Czech writer; Honored Art Worker of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Fought in World War I (1914–18) and was a prisoner of war in Russia beginning in 1915.

The subject of Russia was reflected in Kubka’s books The Poets of Revolutionary Russia (1924) and Dobrovsty and Russia (1926). The historical novels Páleček’s Smile (1946) and Paleček’s Tears (1948) about medieval Bohemia, as well as the large cycle of novels (1950–56) about four generations of the Czech Martin family, from the Revolution of 1848 to May 1945 (One Hundred Twenty Days, Wind From the Interior, Nest in a Storm,and others), became widely known. The struggle for peace was the theme of the satirical series Little Stories for Mr. Truman (1951; Russian translation, 1952). Works in the style of memoirs —With My Own Eyes (1959) and Voices From the East (1960), about meetings with F. I. Chaliapin, A. A. Fadeev, A. N. Tolstoy, V. V. Mayakovsky, and M. A. Sholokhov, as well as Faces From the West (1961)—were devoted to representatives of Czech and world culture. Kubka was the author of a collection of sketches about the Soviet Union, Mornings on the Black Sea (1956).