Egon Hostovský (23 April 1908 – 7 May 1973) was a Czech writer, editor and journalist.

Biography

Born in

Hronov Hronov () is a town in Náchod District in the Hradec Králové Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 6,000 inhabitants. It is known as the birthplace of writer Alois Jirásek. Administrative parts Villages of Malá Čermná, Rokytník, Velk ...

to a Jewish family, Hostovský studied at the gymnasium in Náchod in 1927, then took up

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

. He briefly attended the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor ...

in 1929, but he did not graduate. He returned to Prague in 1930 and worked as an editor in several publishing houses. In 1937, Hostovský joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1939, he was sent on a tour of the

Benelux The Benelux Union ( nl, Benelux Unie; french: Union Benelux; lb, Benelux-Unioun), also known as simply Benelux, is a politico-economic union and formal international intergovernmental cooperation of three neighboring states in western Europe: B ...

countries. He was there when the

German occupation German-occupied Europe refers to the sovereign countries of Europe which were wholly or partly occupied and civil-occupied (including puppet governments) by the military forces and the government of Nazi Germany at various times between 1939 an ...

of Czechoslovakia took place, so he settled in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

. After Paris was occupied in 1940, he fled to Portugal and then, in 1941, he travelled to the United States, where he worked in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

at the consulate of Czechoslovakia's government-in-exile. While there, his Jewish family was persecuted by the Nazis. His father, sisters, and their families died in the Nazi concentration camps. After

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, in 1946, he returned to Czechoslovakia and again worked at the Foreign Ministry, but in 1948, following the communist coup d'état, he began his second exile, first to Denmark, then to Norway and finally to the United States, where he worked as a

Czech language Czech (; Czech ), historically also Bohemian (; ''lingua Bohemica'' in Latin), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 10 million people, it serves as the official language of the Czech Re ...

teacher and later as a journalist and editor at Radio Free Europe. He remained there for the rest of his life and became a U.S. citizen in 1957. He continued to write in Czech. Several of his novels, including ''The Midnight Patient'' and ''Three Nights'', were translated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Philip Hillyer Smith, Jr., a scholar of linguistics and the Czech language. After his 1973 death in Montclair, New Jersey, a literary prize, the , was founded in his name by his third wife. Their son (b. 1958) is a poet He was related to the Austrian-Jewish writer

Stefan Zweig Stefan Zweig (; ; 28 November 1881 – 22 February 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular write ...

, whom he described as "a very distant relative".“Egon Hostovský: Vzpomínky, studie a dokumenty o jeho díle a osudu”, Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1974 Some sources describe them as cousins.

Works

His work is influenced by his Jewish origin and exile. His literary heroes fight (inner) evil, due to political situation are forced to leave their country and search for lost certainties and roots. Before his first emigration his work was influenced by

expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

. * ''Zavřené dveře'', 1926 * ''Stezka podél cesty'', 1928 – psychological novel * ''Ghetto v nich'', Pokrok, Praha 1928 * ''Danajský dar'', 1930 * ''Případ profesora Kornera'', 1932 * ''Černá tlupa'', 1933 * ''Žhář'', 1935 / Melantrich, Praha 1948 * ''Dům bez pána'', 1937 * ''Listy z vyhnanství'', České Národní Sdružení v Americe, Chicago 1941 * ''Sedmkrát v hlavní úloze'', New Yorkský Denník, New York 1942 * ''Úkryt'', 1943 * ''The Hideout'', from Czech ''(Úkryt)'' by Fern Long, Random House, New York 1945 * ''Seven times the leading man'', from Czech ''(Sedmkrát v hlavní úloze)'' by Fern Long, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London 1945 * ''Cizinec hledá byt'', 1947 * ''Osamělí buřiči'', Lidové noviny, Brno 1948 * ''Manipulation of the Zhdanov line in Czechoslovakia'', National Committee for a Free Europe, New York 1952 * ''Nezvěstný'', 1951 / 1955 * ''The Midnight Patient'', 1954, from Czech ''(Půlnoční pacient)'' by Alice Backer and Bernard Wolfe * ''Dobročinný večírek'', 1957 * ''The charity ball'', from Czech ''(Dobročinný večírek)'' by Philip H. Smith Jr., Doubleday, Garden City N.Y. 1958 * ''Půlnoční pacient'', 1959, ''(The Midnight Patient)'' * ''The plot'', from Czech ''( Všeobecné spiknutí)'' by Alice Backer and Bernard Wolfe, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y. 1961 * ''Tři noci'', Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences in America, New York 1964 * ''Literární dobrodružství českého spisovatele v cizině (aneb o ctihodném povolání kouzla zbaveném)'', Nový domov, Toronto 1966 * ''Cizinci hledají byt'', Odeon, Praha 1967 * ''Osvoboditel se vrací'', Index, Köln 1972 – drama * '' Všeobecné spiknutí'', 1961 / Melantrich, Praha 1969 / 68 Publishers, Toronto 1973 – partly autobiographical, ''(The plot)'' * ''Tři noci. Epidemie'', ed. Olga Hostovská, Nakladatelství Franze Kafky, Praha 1997 His work is included in: * ''Hundred towers: a Czechoslovak anthology of creative writing'', L. B. Fischer, 1945 * ''The Jews of Czechoslovakia'', Philadelphia and New York, 1971, pp-148-154: Hostovský contributed a chapter (“The Czech-Jewish Movement”). References to him are made in the following books: * ''Lexikon české literatury : osobnosti, díla, instituce'', Vladimír Forst et al. Praha : Academia, 1993. 589pp. .

References

External links

short The New York Times biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hostovsky, Egon 1908 births 1973 deaths People from Hronov Czech novelists Male novelists Czech male writers American people of Czech-Jewish descent Jewish refugees Expressionist writers Group 42 Recipients of the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk 20th-century novelists Czech exiles 20th-century male writers Czechoslovak emigrants to the United States