Veronika Tuckerova, photo by Ondrej Pribyl; Jiri Kolar, Kafka’s Prague, collage

Veronika Tuckerova will discuss the ways Kafka was perceived in Czechoslovakia from the 1920s to 1989. Kafka’s Prague origin was important to many Czech interpreters and readers, from Kafka’s bilingual contemporary Paul Eisner who promoted the topos of “triple ghetto,” to poets and artists such as Emanuel Frynta, Jan Lukas, and Jiri Kolar, to the 1970s and 1980s dissidents such as Jirina Siklova, Vaclav Havel, and Milan Simecka, who invoked Kafka in their letters from prison. The talk draws on a book manuscript, Reading Kafka in Prague.

Veronika Tuckerova is a literary scholar, art critic, and translator. She has been teaching at Harvard University’s Slavic Department since 2013. She grew up in Prague and studied at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at Columbia University. Her interests include Czech and German literature, art and literature of dissent and underground, visual studies, and translation theory and practice. Her articles about Kafka appeared in journals such as The New German Critique, Journal of World Literature, and brücken. She is a regular contributor to a Prague-based Revolver Revue and the Jewish monthly, Roš chodeš.

The event will be livestreamed on Zoom. RSVP through Eventbrite to receive the Zoom link.

Free and open to the public. Suggested donation $10.  

The event is a part of lecture series Literature by and about Czech and Slovak Jews organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews and Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, New York Chapter, with support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.