Eliška Krásnohorská
(1847 – 1926)
Průkopnící českého feminismu / Czech Feminist Trailblazers
Lenka Vytlacilova
Sponsored by Sunshine for Women
Introduced by writer Karolina Svěltá to both literature and the women’s rights movement, Krásnohorská edited the first Czech women journal, helped to found the first girls’ gymnasium (a high school which prepares one for advanced study) in Prague, and wrote numerous works of lyric poetry and social and literary criticism. Today, however, in addition to being known for her feminist works, she is best remembered for her children’s literature, opera librettos, and translations, including works by Puskin and Byron.
Eliška’s mother, Dorota Vodvařková, was from a poor Blatná family. Her father was married three times and had 21 children. Her mother escaped from poverty by moving to Prague where she worked for the family of a military general as a maid. There she met her future husband, Pech. Wanting time for reading, painting, and music, Dorota Vodvařková would have preferred to enter a convent rather than to marry. To avoid the marriage, she returned home where she tried to commit suicide by drowning in a local pond. Deciding the water was too cold, she married instead. The marriage was a happy one: Eliška’s father had a small, prosperous business and so had enough money to buy books for her mother. They had 8 children, 5 survived. Youngest, except for her even younger sister, Bohdanka, Eliška lived a middle-class life. Although her father died when she was two years old, Eliška’s family did not become impoverished. Rather, her mother sold the family business to one of her late husband’s sons and bought a house in the center of Prague where she lived with her five children. Eliška’s mother supported herself and her talented children in a variety of ways and her house was visited by many of her sons’ friends. All the boys and girls learned to paint and to play piano, although the boys and their friends were provided for first.
Eliška had her first job when she was 13 years old and was employed to help teach French in the local school for 4 goldens. Permitted to spend her hard earned money as she chose, Eliška bought a German and a French dictionary, a book on Latin grammar, a manuscript from Kraluv Hradec, another manuscript from Zelená Hora, as well as fabric for a dress. She also used some of her earnings to pay the tuition for a music course for beginners in Žofin academy: women were not permitted in the more advanced classes. As she sat with her sewing, she conjugated Latin verbs, repeating amo, amas, amat. Her happiness was short-lived, only a year. Her new coat was stolen at the school which caused her to become sick and the headmaster did not want to employ her any more.
When Eliška was 15 years old she attended her first ball where she met for first time Karolina Svěltá, a poet, and Vitěslav Hálek. F. L. Rieger said that he expected her to become a famous writer.
At the end of 1860s Eliška’s mother moved the family to Pilzen for economic reasons.
St. Bartholomew’s Church, Pilzen
With the approval of her mother, Eliška wrote her libretto for the opera Leila by the composer, Bendl. Eliška also wanted to publish her first book of poetry. The printer agreed on the condition that the poet Neruda would support the work. Eliška thought that perhaps her old friend Svěltá could help convince Neruda to support her since Svěltá was also a friend of Neruda. At the same time, a conflict between Eliška and her mother arose. Her mother wanted Eliška to remain dependent upon her. Her mother believed that it was not necessary for Eliška to learn any more. After all, Eliška already knew more than she did: she reads, writes, goes to the opera, fights with her sister, sews fashionable new dress (arousing the envy of the neighbors who wanted to know the name of the salon where she purchased the dresses), and sings in public. Why can’t Eliška be happy? But Eliška was not content with only singing, singing, and more singing.
Treated badly during an illness, Eliška nearly lost her eyesight by using the sunbathing method and her hearing by being poisoned with quack medicines. Dr šlechta offered her free treatment but her mother did not permit it. After Eliška became successful, against her mother’s advice, she applied for and received a passport to travel in the šumava mountains. Probably her only vacation in her life, Eliška traveled with her brother, Jindrich, and a sister, Bohdanka. Later, she wrote two books of poems about šumava. After returning from her vacation, she decided to abandon her family and to move to Prague.
On Saint Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1874, Krásnohorská went by train to Prague. Expected by her old friend, Miss Lauremanová, they shared a small, one-room apartment, in an old house. The two French women who lived in the apartment before them shared it with chickens. Her mother wanted to have Eliška under her surveillance because she suspected, quite correctly, that Eliška was under the bad influence of her old friend Karolina Svěltá, who was known to be involved in “suspicious” activities.
Her mother was correct. Eliška not only wrote lyric poetry, translations (for example, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz ), books for children, and librettos (Smetana’s opera The Kiss, a rewriting of one of her friend Svěltá’s novels), but she also became active in Výrobní spolek, the American ladies club (Spolek amerických dam), edited the women’s journal Women’s Letters (Ženske listy), and wrote commentaries on social problems and literary works. To the best of my knowledge, she was the first Czech woman who tried to be a literary critic. The articles in Women’s Letters were so good that men began submitting articles to the journal. Somewhat controversial, the popular Czech writer Jakub Arbes said, “Women writing literary criticism is neither fish nor fowl.” When Krásnohorská wrote an article about literature, for Muzejník, a journal of the National Museum in Prague, František Ladislav Rieger, a political leader of the Czech National Revival movement, sent his niece to her. She told Krásnohorská , “It is not suitable for just anyone, especially young girls or proper women, to write in a scientific journal such as Muzejník. To which she added, “You can write whatever you want to write and publish it wherever you want to publish it, except in Muzejník because it is a journal only for learned men.” But she continued writing for the journal.
In Prague, while still a young slip of a girl, Eliška visited the famous composer Smetana and told him that his Czech was not good. He accepted her criticism and, contrary to custom, she wrote four librettos for him: Kiss (Hubička), Sacred (Tajemství), The Devil’s Wall ( Čertova stena) and unfinished Viola, Shakespears´s Twelfth Night dream. Once, when she was a little put out and Smetana saw her crying, he told her “I am glad for the kiss you have gave me.”
Probably by her own choice, Eliška never had a very active social life. Friendly, always a gracious hostess, and glad to have company, she never invited men to visit her. She was a literary figure and was visited by other literary figures, not a debutant- diletant who did not know language. She lent a visitor her general grammar book, which was never returned her. In midst of this chaos she wrote a book of poetry, To Slav South (K slovanskému jihu). She was criticized by Josef Durdik and by Vrchlický because she did not include any erotic poems . She rebuffed similar criticism of the poetry in her journal Women´s Letter on the ground that the journal was also for young girls, an audience for whom erotic verse would have been inappropriate. Later, wanting to conclude peace with her, Vrchlický tried to force her to admit to being unhappy. She refused him this small pleasure. Her relationships with men remained Platonic to the consternation of some of the rich, famous, and powerful among them.
Eventually her mother and her sister, Bohdanka, moved to Prague where Eliška and her friend shared a two room apartment in the center of Prague with them, Krásnohorská and her friend in one room, her mother and her sister in the other. Bohdanka wanted be a painter. MuŽak, Svěltá’s husband and a teacher of painting himself, warned her that a career as an artist was not for a women. If she want to paint, she had to take courses and become qualified as a teacher. He was right. So Bohdanka took courses in an art school for some time. But when the headmaster of the school changed, her studies ended. Some others girls were accepted, but she was not. The new headmaster šmoranc said that “her figural works are not within school program and frame.” (Co přinesla leta, p.96) Krásnohorská explained it this way: “Bohdanka strove for perfection and according to the new headmaster’s conservative thoughts, this was not permitted for women. In different words, he saw in Bohdanka´s careful drawings the dangerous monster of emancipation crawling into the artistic school.” (Co přinesla leta, p. 96) At that time, she could not even dream of studying at the Academy in Prague, although it was possible to study art in the much more liberal Munich. But their mother was against it: the family could not afford to send a daughter away to school for many years and her mother also did not want a daughter to travel alone. So her career as an artist was finished. Bohdanka took the exams to become a teacher of drawing and taught in Vyrobní spolek where she helped Svěltá and her sister.
In her Women Question [187?] , (second edition in 1881) she advocated educational and professional opportunities for women and equal pay for equal work. She wrote : “Remember the protests which broke out all over the country when the female teachers wanted to be paid the same as the male teachers. It was said, ‘It may seem unjust, but in spite of the fact that the same education and job responsibilities are required for female teachers as for male teachers, the male teacher needs more money to live on.’ ” “But,” she continued, “when the shopkeeper replaces a male shop assistant with a female shop assistant to do the same work but at a lower wage, will the displaced male worker then claim that the man has greater needs? Lower wages for women are just not just.” (p. 16 -17) Krásnohorská signed a petition for equal pay for teachers together with other women writers. However, it caused her problems among male teachers who boycotted her books by refusing to allow them in school libraries.
Continuing her theme of women and paid work, Krásnohorská stated in her book, “It is impossible for a small artisan, a shopkeeper, or a clerk in normal times to feed not only his family, but all destitute kinswomen, and to secure an income sufficient for his wife and daughters to refrain from paid labor in the event of his death. (domacne hospodarit). Not only does every father know this, but all men know it. Nonetheless, men are against the women’s movement, calling it nonsense. They must have been born mad to be able to honor their prejudices by naming them “principles”. (p. 22)
For Krásnohorská, the woman question was a social question. She wrote: ” Poor women worked all the time, despite the fact that the issues raised by the women’s movement had not been addressed. Poor women had to work: they, quite literally, could not live any other way. On the other hand, rich women will never have to work for their daily bread even if there is much progress in the women’s movement. It is in the middle- class, between the iron need of poverty and the comforts of wealth, where the women’s movement finds its reason for existence and will be taken seriously. The problems which the women’s movement seeks to cure are derived mainly from the needs of the lives of middle-class women, especially the need of middle-class women for job opportunities.
To Krásnohorská the most important part of the women question was opening employment opportunities for women in industry, the church, and various white collar occupations which required an education. [18-19]
Whatever importance a woman has in the family, which was very great in the past, she is still needed today as a mother, wife, and housekeeper. Economists have calculated the value of women’s unpaid labor in the home, the millions of dollars in the national economy that is saved by women doing this housework. In some cases, if we take away women’s unpaid labor, men can economize by doing with less or, even, without some things at all. In other cases, cases where nothing exists, that something must first be created before it can be economized away. Not all women can be housekeepers and the number of women who are not housekeepers is amazing.
Krásnohorská began her fight to open the first girls´ gymnasium in Prague by helping to collect a petition with 4810 signatures. But it was difficult work. As expected with any new proposal, the leading Czech politician, F. L.Rieger, failed to support her.
When she wrote a letter to the Viennese doctor, Emanuel Engel, he replied, “education is only the exaggerated desires of emancipated women” (Co přinesla léta, 1928, Praha, p.124). After visiting him in Prague, she summarized his opinion on women as “the ideal girl had seemed to him as a hot-house flower, which must not be caught by the currents of life with its storms and winds, with its concurrent fights for knowledge and bread.” He replied, “Young ladies and matrons, those who will stand equal with men in scholarship and spiritual work are only exemplars of ambitious viragos, who are useless invalids for human society, who have never done anything useful, and who will also never do anything useful.” (Co přinesla léta, 1928, Praha, p.124). But when she showed him journal articles by women from all over the world, articles she had been collecting for many years, he changed his opinion saying, “I did not know that women had written so much on the ‘women question’. But we men do not have much spare time to read women’s journals.” (Co přinesla léta, 1928, Praha, p.124). He signed and supported her petition which was presented to the Reichrad (Parliament) on March 3, 1890 by M. P. Adámek.
The good doctor was not the only gentleman to have doubts of the utility of a girls’ gymnasium. One day Krásnohorská met the director of a state institution for the education women teachers. He threatened her claiming, “God will punish you for this sin against his eternal law. If we continue corrupting Czechs girls, you will be doomed.” (Co přinesla léta, 1928, Praha, p.125). Mrs. Pervolf, mother of a professor in Warsaw, Poland (then a part of czarist Russian Duchy of Warsaw) and of two known Prague women teachers, told her, ” I must reproach you, miss! I believe you have a good heart and are a friend of teachers. But know, when you call for a punishment, God must punish you.” Warning of the consequences of God’s wrath, she predicted, “You will be punished; just you wait and see.” (Co přinesla léta, 1928, Praha, p.126).
Although Krásnohorská was afraid that there would be no students, the gymnasium, nonetheless, opened with 51 students in mid-September, delayed from the usual first of September opening by a flood. Some time later, the gymnasium had an exhibition of students’ works. Professor šebesta told Krásnohorská that she should remove the Latin and Greek students’ works because “…they will only be laughed at by specialists. They are too good. Clearly, they were written by girls more experienced than your freshmen girls.” (Co přinesla léta, 1928, Praha, p.140).
She began her campaign to open university employment to women with a petition drive. The arts departments were opened to women in 1897, followed by the medical department in 1900. A combination of changing literary tastes, intense criticism by a few of her male literary colleagues, and retaliation for her feminist activism caused editors to begin rejecting her works. For her 50th birthday, the journal New Cult (Nový kult) remarked, “The highly-moral and highly-patriotic Miss E. Krásnohorská celebrated the fiftieth anniversary her spinsterhood.” Disappointed in her new students, the young girls seemed to be indifferent to Czech nationalism.
Still, she published short stories, fairy tales, and, under the name, Solimna Řetkvička, puzzles, in the journals Světozor, Golden Prague (Zlatá Praha) and Jarý věk. Gradually, all of her childhood companions died: her mother, sister, brother, the composer Smetana, the poet Neruda, even, Karolina Svěltá. She began writing literature for youth. Today, among the general populous she is best remembered for Her Stubborn Head (Svéhlavička), a text translated and rewritten from German.
After she became a success, she wrote three new volumes and began to learn English, later translating Child Harold. Continuing to lecture and write many letters, her health and her eyesight began to deteriorate. She visited Běrlohrad and had an operation for her eyesight.
Běrlohrad
After the operation she translated Puskin and wrote another book of poetry, The Dreaming About Theater and Echo of Our Time. She translated her poetry into German and tried to published it under pretext that the translation was given her by unknown admirer, Marko Tuman. But she was rejected.
After the war, WW I, she started to write two autobiographical books, From My Life and What the Years Bring. The work ended with her death at age 79.
A partial list of Krásnohorská’s major works:
Z máje Žití (From the Spring of Life, 1871)
Ze šumavy (From Sumava, 1873)
K slovanskému jihu (Three Fairy -Tales, 1885)
Svéhlavička (Stuborn Head, 1887)
Letorosty (1887)
šumavský Robinson (Robinson from Sumava, 1887)
Bajky velkých (Stubborn Head Becomes a Bride, 1900)
Pohádky zimního večera (Legends and myths,1916)
And for references:
Z. Nejedlý, O literatuře, 1953
F. Strejček, Eliška Krásnohorská, 1922)
A. PraŽák, Míza stromu (1940)
Čeští spisovatelé deseti století , ed. R. štastný (1972)
Čeští spisovatelé 19. a počátku 20. století, eds. K. Holová, M. Otruba., and Z. Pešat (1982)
An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, Vol 1, A-K, Katarina M. Wilson (ed.), [New York: Garland Publishing, 1991] pp. 665-666
