Stories as dark as the gloom of the Sumava forests
A collection of five short stories from Šumava from the pen of Karel Klostermann.
1/ The Dead Don't Come Back (dramatization)
Performers: Peter - Ivan Trojan, Matej - Lukas Hlavica, Blažena - Tereza Bebarová, Tomášků - Milan Kačmarčík, judge - Stanislav Zindulka, the first woodcutter - Otmar Brancuzský, the second woodcutter Ivo Kubečka, the third woodcutter Jiří Zahajský, Oldřich Navrátil, gendarme Miroslav Masopust Recording from 2004
2/ Blizzards(reading)
Read by Miroslav Doležal Recorded in 1971
3/What Caused the Fatal Easter (reading)
Read by Věra Hlaváčková Recorded in 2022
4/ White Samun (reading)
Read by Miroslav Rataj Recorded in 2014
5/ What people learn in the world (reading)
Read by Apolena Veldová Recorded in 2021
It is hard to guess how Karel Klostermann (1848-1923) would have seen today's Šumava interwoven with a network of cycle paths that lead past the vanished villages where his German relatives lived. His talents would surely have provided ample incentive for an equally ruthless view of the region, in which almost everything has changed, only the same melancholy haze rises from the woods, revealing, that should have been kept secret, hiding here, ...that was crying out for attention. An ideal setting for stories as dark as the gloom of the local rainforest.
Five such stories come to life in this collection of short stories. Anyone who saw them as merely the author's heightened imagination would be mistaken. Klostermann is known to have often been inspired by real events, as he experienced them himself or as he heard them told. This is also the case in the story of a man who is presumed dead and suddenly returns to his wife - who has stopped waiting for him. But only the dead don't come back, to paraphrase the title of a short story that was dramatised by Czech Radio exactly twenty years ago.
If in this case the author was basing his story on what allegedly happened, there can be no doubt about the credibility of the tragedy in Sušice at Easter 1859. Under the weight of hundreds of pilgrims heading to the Chapel of the Guardian Angel, a wooden bridge over the Otava River broke and more than fifty people died. This tragedy forms the framework of a narrative in which love and a curse play a fatal role.
The inevitability of fate accompanies Klostermann's work as one of its basic staples. On the contrary, only rarely, like a golden flake in the Otava River, does a smile glimmer in his texts, as in the final story about a man whose experience of the "big world" brings him nothing but misery.
It is good that we have the opportunity to get to know this ever-popular writer also as a sympathetic observer of human weaknesses and imperfections. But most of all, it is good that we can discover Šumava together with him, a land of stories filled with anguish and dark beauty, just like herself.
