Konstantin Biebl

26 February 1898, Slavětín near Louny – 12 November 1951, Prague

During the First Year War, Konstantin Biebl was captured on the Balkan front and as a soldier of the Austrian army sentenced to death. However, he managed to escape and return home in 1918. He began studying medicine at the faculty of medicine of Charles University in Prague. Between 1921 and 1924, he was a member of the Literary Group and after that he went to Devětsil. He took several longer trips abroad. His journey to Ceylon, Sumatra and Java inspired his collection With the Ship That Brings Tea and Coffee (S lodí, jež dováží čaj a kávu, 1927) and significantly influenced his poetics. In 1934, he signed the manifesto of a group of Czech Surrealists. During the Second World War, he collaborated with film production and after the war he was employed by the Ministry of Information and worked as a member of the Film Council. His long illness of the pancreas and a depression during the communist repressions led to his suicide.

Biebl began writing poems influenced by Jiří Wolker’s poetry. Images of war connected with lyrical melancholy appear in collections Faithful Voice (Věrný hlas, 1924) and Fracture (Zlom, 1925). The collection With the Ship That Brings Tea and Coffee and the shorter lyrical prose Plancius (1931) are written in the spirit of Poetism and its associative imagination. The peak of this period is his polythematic poem The New Icarus (Nový Ikaros, 1929), composed as a voyage thorough the modern world with its changes, wars, elusiveness and transience, in which the biggest and most permanent value is love. During his Surrealist period, he reacted to the Munich Agreement. At the beginning of the occupation and the Second World War, he published a small collection of Surrealist poetry Mirror of Night (Zrcadlo noci, 1939). His only post-war collection Without Concern (Bez obav, 1951) contains tendentious political poetry. Only a few poems from the early 1940s still contain traces of Biebl’s former poetic imagination.