The Free Academy: Veronika Tuckerová

In her lecture, Veronika Tuckerová will focus on the specific nature of the Czech reception of Kafka in Czechoslovakia during communism. Despite the fact that Kafka’s work was not published after 1948, apart from in the 1960s, it did not disappear from the consciousness of Czech readers. In fact, quite the contrary: It was disseminated in samizdat in old and new translations and acquired meanings that added to the broad range of interpretations of Kafka common in the Western world. The lecture will focus on the prison letters of Václav Havel, Jiřina Šiklová and Milan Šimečka.

Veronika Tuckerová is a German Studies and Slavic scholar. Born in Prague, she graduated from Columbia University in New York and has been at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 2013. Her research interests include the Czech reception of Franz Kafka, the dissent and visual art. She has published in the Journal of World Literature, New German Critique, Brücken and other journals. She is a long-time contributor to Revolver Revue. Her book Reading Kafka in Prague is set for publication by the Bloomsbury Academic publishing house in New York.