Chapters from the Alphabet

(...) The chapters from the Alphabet were originally written for radio. About five years ago. That's why the stories are limited in length. Each chapter couldn't be longer than 5 minutes. These stories are a bit like a cubist painting; it was necessary to cut away everything unnecessary. Technically, this forced me to be concise. But that's actually the external side of things. You'll probably be more interested in the internal side. The roots of these chapters go back to my youth. It's a kind of price I paid for my few years at high school. At school, I encountered characters and destinies that amazed and fascinated me. I learned things about people that left others unmoved, such as Galileo or Descartes. Or Anna Pomeranian, who broke iron. These were things that stunned me at the time; I couldn't come to terms with them immediately. I often cried over their fates and had to leave the classroom. So you could say that I wrote the chapters to prove to my teachers that I wasn't such a bad student after all. (...)
(...) Of course, many things always affect a person at once. When I was writing these stories, I played music. Mainly Bach's fugues. I told myself, this is how it must look, this is the form the story must take. The music fades away, but then there is silence... you understand, it's a verbal version of that atmosphere, that mood. That's how I would like the reader to understand it. (...)
– excerpt from an interview with Ester Krumbachová published in the magazine Československý voják, vol. 16, no. 18, August 26, 1967
(EK001564_0023)