Václav Vokolek

* 1947

  • "I was about five or six years old and I see some nervousness one evening. My parents are rushing to send me to bed, but the kids can sense everything, so I pretended to be asleep and I watched them. Suddenly I see my parents are going to the basement. In my nightgown I am following them so they can't see me, and there my normally manually inept father is tearing out the lining in the former mangle area and hiding something. The very next day, I riped off the same lining and found my father's poem, February. My parents did not have an idea that we had a bunker in the mangle premises and we used to meet secretly there with the boys from the neighbourhood. So I read February to them when I was eight years old. An amazing danger that fortunately turned out well. Later I felt that this poem of my father's was the satisfaction of Czech literature. I always thought that if the regime changed, this poem would be in the reading books. My father was the only Czech writer who radically and immediately condemned February 1948. For example, the poet Karel Šiktanc wrote a celebration of February 1948 as late as in the 1960s. So after the Velvet Revolution, I took my father's poem and took it to Literárni noviny, where I had a good friend as editor-in-chief. But he told me very promptly that he would not print such things."

  • "That was when my parents submitted my application to what had been a grammar school previously, at that time an eleven-year school. The headmistress was a great communist, well-known throughout Děčín, who even adopted a Korean child. When she found out that I had applied to her school, she had a hysterical fit. Fortunately, some good soul found out and ran to tell my father, who withdrew the application. The most I could do was to go to an apprenticeship, but I ended up going to an technical school of construction, which even had had the status of a university during the first republic. I spent a completely useless four years there, and I knew from the first day that I would never do that [construction]. And I never did."

  • "I felt it at the time as a detriment that Květa was innocently imprisoned. So I asked her about it once as a young man and she told me something that completely stunned me and it is still an important topic for me, but I couldn't even understand it at the time. I asked her what it was like there, and I was expecting the kind of classic prison horrors. But she said it was beautiful. The girls who were thieves or prostitutes needed her. She felt in her place there, she was needed there, and they got on wonderfully. When the amnesty came, it actually made her very angry. I've never heard such a statement from a political prisoner. And that was typical Květa."

  • "Emanuel Frynta was one of the few people who did not abandon my father. He was just as brave as my father, but in a different way. He came from a university family, he was very talented, but when changes came after 1948 at the university, he left the university to show his disapproval. He was in trouble all his life. He didn't have a university degree because he was brave. Or rather, he didn't want to assent to cowardice. I always lived with him in Prague, I knew his family and we had a wonderful relationship. He was a great influence on many artists and he was infinitely knowledgeable about literature. He became for me a window into the Prague art world. At that time, to say the name Medek was something unimaginable for the young generation, we were dazed. Frynta called Medek and arranged for me to meet him. Medek received me with amazing grace and humility, even though he was a master and I was nothing, he talked to me quite seriously."

  • "Somehow, in the unfree state, we were creating complete freedom for ourselves. We played theatre and so on and lived completely independently of the state. I made my living then as a restorer, someone as a watchman, but in a way we were actually free regarding our own personal freedom. Also because we didn't care about careers, we didn't care about money and we were supporting each other. I remember, for example, the Hůla brothers and their wonderful gallery and gatherings of people. When we gathered there for an opening of an exhibition with a hundred people, it was a success. So those were meetings of a very small group of people, but everyone was extremely selfless."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 31.03.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:01:14
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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    Praha, 26.05.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:10:03
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I was as free during the normalization as I am today

Václav Vokolek in the 1980s
Václav Vokolek in the 1980s
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Václav Vokolek was born on 1 January 1947 in Děčín to parents Vladimír and Věra as their only son. After the communist coup, the communists nationalized the family printing house in Pardubice. As a result, his grandfather died. Witness‘s father, writer Vladimír Vokolek, refused to join the Czechoslovak Writers‘ Union, was not allowed to publish any of his books and began teaching at a primary school. Květa Vokolková, the sister of the witness´ father, who was a nun, was imprisoned by the communists for subverting the republic. His uncles Vlastimil and Vojmír took refuge in their closed inner world of art and worked on the fringes, without being published, or publishing just in samizdat, just like the witness´ father Vladimír. Václav Vokolek was not allowed to study at the grammar school because of his background and graduated from the secondary technical school of construction. In the 1960s he was admitted to the Faculty of Education, but left his studies soon. Thanks to the professional influence of his uncle Vojmír, he had wished to become a painter since childhood. However, the official teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts did not comply at all with his idea of modern art. From 1967 he worked as a caretaker of the chateau in Nelahozeves, where he had space for his own work. From 1967 he worked as a caretaker of the monastery in Osek. Here he met the last Greek Catholic bishop who had been interned there, and in nearby Litvínov he made the crucial friendship with the writer Josef Jedlička. At the beginning of normalization, he witnessed personal retaliations, which were given free rein by the consolidated communist power during the pparty purges. In 1971 he decided to devote himself to wood restoration, which allowed him to work freely and independently. Personal inner freedom became his highest value. From the same year he began to write and create books as graphic scores and visual texts. He concentrated on work in the borderland between fine art and literature. He exhibited his work at unofficial exhibitions throughout the Bohemia and abroad. In the 1980s, he often travelled to Poland, which he grew fond of thanks to the atmosphere around Solidarity. He became friends with several leading figures of the movement. After the Velvet Revolution, he began to devote himself even more to teaching, he worked as an editor of several magazines, published his poems and essays, co-founded the publishing house Triáda and published dozens of books. At the time of the recording (2022) he was living and still working in Milovice.