Rudolf Těsnohlídek

Rudolf Těsnohlídek (7 June 1882 in Čáslav - 12 January 1928 in Brno, suicide) was a Czech writer, poet, journalist and translator. He also used the pseudonym Arnošt Bellis.

He attended secondary school (gymnasium) in Hradec Králové and later started to study Czech, history and French at university in Prague but didn't finish.

Starting in 1908, he was a contributor to the Brno newspaper Lidové noviny. His serialized novel Liška Bystrouška (Vixen Sharp Ears), written to accompany a series of drawings by Stanislav Lolek, appeared in the Lidové noviny between 7 April and 23 June 1920, was published as a book in 1921, won a state prize and achieved lasting popularity. This optimistic tale, somewhere between a children's fairy tale and adult satire, was used as the basis for Leoš Janáček's opera The Cunning Little Vixen (Příhody Lišky Bystroušky, 1923).

Some of Těsnohlídek's other work reflects more pessimism and alienation than the lighthearted Vixen's tale.

His life, as interpreted by his journalistic colleague Bedřich Golombek, was a melodramatic tragedy imbued with pessimism, darkness, melancholy and decadence, a life plagued from childhood by feelings of sadness and social exclusion. In his teens, he watched helplessly as a friend drowned. When he was 21, he married Jindra Kopecká, a woman with tuberculosis. Two months after their wedding, on a holiday in Norway, she shot herself in the heart in front of him, possibly accidentally. Těsnohlídek was accused of murdering her, and had to endure two trials before being acquitted. In 1907 he moved to Brno, where he became a reporter of soudničky (cases from the local magistrate's court) for Lidové noviny. After he had met Janáček and discussed plans for the opera based on Liška Bystrouška, he married again, but this wife left him. He married a third time. He became interested in exploring the Moravian underground caves, wrote extensively about them, and submitted his drafts for publication but found they had been heavily edited without his knowledge. On 12 January 1928, he shot himself, as his first wife had done. His third wife gassed herself to death on hearing the news.

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