Satan's horses

Zdeněk Pošíval

Graduate of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He worked as a director in 1962-1969 in Moravia, in the autumn of 1969 he returned to Prague with his family and together with his friend, the dramaturge Miloslav Klíma, he founded the Actors' Cabaret Club "Na Forbíně" in the Malostranská beseda. He has collected several national and international awards for his work as a theatre, radio and television scriptwriter. After 1990 he became increasingly involved in writing. He wrote essays for magazines, novels focusing on western detective stories under the pseudonym R. H. Douglas, to later devote himself exclusively to fiction. In 1998, he wrote a detective story set in contemporary Prague, Murder Week (which was one of the best-selling books the week it was published), and then Zdeněk Pošíval concentrated on historical stories set in the Czech Republic. Without abandoning the principle of adventure themes in his works, he gradually reaches much deeper dives into society and the mentality of individuals, for example in 1999 in the book That Night the Full Moon Shone or in 2000 in the novel Temptation and Revenge. Although the following novels published by Epocha Publishing House exist in separate plots, they feature a unifying protagonist, the landowner Jožík Bukovský: Satan's Horses (2003), Satan's Spring (2005, the book received the Jiří Marek Award for the best Czech crime novel of the year), Satan's Moments (2010), Forbidden Touches (2012). A completely free completion of the pentalogy about the landowner Jožík Bukovský, Who Hides His Face takes place during the cruel 17th century and looks for an image of the humanistic mission of man in this world in human situations. Pošíval's final novel was published in record time, so the author could still please himself with it. Zdeněk Pošíval's last artistic wish was a book edition of his memories of the school term of 1945, which he spent with his grandfather Jindřich Hess in Radňov in the Pelhřimov region. The book Dědeček's Sentence, or The Smell of Fresh Sawdust, Bread and Honey, which was first published in a sequel in the online Positivní noviny, is a look through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy at family togetherness, the sense of which has been dominant for the author throughout his life, despite all his personal struggles.