The main trial

 Josef Maršík is a railway official, does he have a wife and children? and above all a rude father-in-law, who is mainly after money, and would like to get rid of his daughter's family so that he can rent their apartment better and more expensively. But in order to provide for his family, to build his dream house with a terrace and balcony, Maršík needs a lot more money! That's when he makes the first bad decision: he's gonna place a dating ad. I mean, there's money among single women...

     Does he get a call from the aging, single Alžběta Válová, the maid to whom her former mistress left her? do you think? seventeen thousand! Maršík is unable to resist this, and step by step he approaches the inevitable tragedy.

 Apparently it really was, at least that's what the advertising leaflet from 1932 says: Karel Čapek, Poláček's colleague from the editorial office of Lidové noviny, had already advised the author of many barrel books and humorous novels to translate his knowledge of the barrel reporter into a more serious, more extensive form. Is that how Karel Poláček's first serious novel came about? The main trial.

 He found inspiration in a two-part barrel book published in Český slovo in 1928 under the title Novel of a Maid. Poláček has developed a sad, but almost trivial case of fraud and insidious murder of an innocent maid into an almost reportorial novel study, which, despite its seriousness and tragedy, does not lack Poláček's characteristic elements of irony, wit and genre detail.

     Poláček's The Main Trial was reworked in 1984 for Czechoslovak Radio by Stanislav Neubert and staged by director Jan Lorman. František Husák gave an excellent performance in the role of Josef Maršík, while Iva Janžurová played the character of the sensitive, naive and ingratiating maid Válová.