Ivan Martin Jirous, nicknamed Magor, had many faces, the author of tender but also dryáčnic verses. Graduated art historian and art critic. But also an unpredictable provocateur. Signatory of Charter 77 and a prominent figure of the underground, an opponent of the totalitarian regime in the former Czechoslovakia, who spent almost eight and a half years in its prisons. Jirous was born on September 23, 1944 in Humpolec and died on the night of November 10, 2011 in Prague.
He considered the sentence: “I only go to battle when it’s lost” to be his life motto. In his way of life, he provoked and provoked various reactions from those around him. Some appreciated his ferocity and consistency in the search for personal freedom and resistance to any kind of tying, others perceived him through the prism of his poetic work. Others considered Jirous to be an eccentric lunatic and an alcoholic. But he himself did not consider himself a contradictory personality: “I don’t feel that way. I live with myself in absolute harmony. I don’t have any problems, other people have problems with me.”
Jirous, who once said that “the underground is a reaction to dehumanization”, was known for his opposition to the former communist regime, but also to the later “dictatorship of degenerate neo-capitalism”. He spent a lot of time in the Vysočina in Prostřední Vydří, where he had a farm and where he lived “well below the subsistence minimum”.
After one arrest, an investigator allegedly told him, “You see, we always beat you.” “You’re wrong,” Magor replied, “I’m winning. I’ve screwed your entire generation.”
Jirous’s first collection of poems, Magor’s Morning Song, is from 1975. It was followed by others, such as Magor’s Swan Songs, for which he received the Tom Stoppard Award. He did not stop writing even after 1989, when his work began to be officially published. Magor’s Summa (1998) was named the best book of the year by critics. In 2006, he received the Jaroslav Seifert Literary Award for lifetime poetic work.
Ivan Martin Jirous was born on September 23, 1944 in Humpolec. Although he studied art history, with the exception of working in the magazine Výtvarná práce, he never devoted himself to the field. He focused his interest on unofficial culture – the underground, which after the first purely literary wave began to converge with music at the end of the 60s. A year before defending his diploma thesis (1968), Jirous started working with the music group The Primitives Group, two years later he became the artistic director of The Plastic People of the Universe and theoretician of the art association Křižovnická škola of pure humor without a joke.
In the following two decades, when he made a living as a security guard and auxiliary worker, he worked as an ideologue and organizer of the Czech underground movement. In 1973 he was sentenced for the first time, after his release he organized, in addition to a number of illegal exhibitions and concerts, two “festivals of the second culture in Czechoslovakia” (Postupice 1974 and Bojanovice 1976). In February 1975, he wrote the Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival, a key text on the roots and current development of Czech independent culture.
This was followed by further stays behind bars, his last imprisonment was ended only by a presidential pardon in November 1989. He was convicted five times in total, mostly for sedition. He spent a total of eight years, five months and three days in prison.
Jirous, who started using the pseudonym Magor in 1972 after a party (allegedly the musician Mejla Hlavsa first called him that), was married twice. The first wife was the poet Věra Jirousová, the second the painter Juliana Stritzková. In his second marriage, he had daughters Františka and Marta, and according to available information, he also had an illegitimate son, Daniel. Officially, Tobiáš Jirous was also his son, but his biological father is the former dissident Jiří Němec.
Ivan Martin Jirous died on the night of November 9-10, 2011 at the age of 67. Shortly after his death, a collection of texts was published entitled Aby radost nejmizela with the subtitle Tribute to Magor. Two films were also made in memory of the opponents of the communist regime. The documentary A Year without Magor was shown for the first time in November 2012 in Prague’s Archa Theater at the Tribute to the Czech Underground II event. Previously, Monika Le Fay’s one-hour documentary 04826 Jirous had its television premiere.
In 2012, Jirous became a laureate of the Pilsen 1 June in memoriam Prize, and in the same city, a bridge over the railway tracks at the South Suburbs railway station was named after this dissident. In 2013, the collections Úloža and Magorův noční spév were published from the estate, in 2015 the collection Akrostichy and in 2018 Magorův ranní zpěv / Magor’s children. In 2017, a biography of Jirous was published by journalist Marek Švehla.
Source: www.tyden.cz
