Jirotka

A new edition of a classic of Czech literature and literary comedy.

Upon its initial publication in Czech in 1942, Saturnin was a bestseller. This is entirely appropriate, for while Saturnin draws on a tradition of Czech comedy and authors such as J. Hasek, K. Čapek, and K. Poláček, it was also clearly influenced by the English masters Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse. Saturnin is the story of a young man in love and his faithful servant Saturnin, who upsets the peaceful rhythm of his master’s domestic arrangements and turns his life inside out. He lures him into an exotic world where he is forced to live dangerously, and he shows him how to cope with any situation. Saturnin lays bare the weaknesses of others and compels them to disclose their ＂true＂ nature--he is a subversive servant.

Written at a time when Czechoslovakia was deep in the grip of the Nazi occupation, Saturnin showed how one form of resistance was to put the world created by invasion out of your mind and create another. However, so recognizably Czech was that ＂other＂ that its popularity did not diminish with the end of the war or, indeed, with the end of the forty years of communism that followed the war’s end. The book has been adapted for radio and television, produced as a film, and has a regular place in the repertoire of the Czech stage.

Zdeněk Jirotka (1911-2003) was a Czech author of radio plays, novels, and short stories. Mark Corner is a translator, author, and lecturer in religious and European studies who lives and works in Brussels.