Translated from the Czech by Carleton Bulkin.
Novelist, playwright, film director, screenwriter, Vladislav Vancura was born in 1891 in Ha¡j (Silesia) into a family with ancestral roots in the nobility. A founding member of the Czech avant-garde artists group DevÄ>tsil in 1920, he served as its first chairman and was instrumental in formulating its Poetist program for literature. Vancura's most acclaimed work, Marketa Lazarova, brought him renown as an innovator of the first order and Czechoslovakia's State Prize for Literature in 1931. He was arrested on May 12, 1942, by the Gestapo, tortured, and executed on June 1, 1942.
