Verše o růži. [Verses on a Rose].

Jaroslav Seifert was a Czech poet, journalist, and the first and only Czech recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1984 for poetry which the Swedish Academy described as endowed with freshness, sensuality, and rich inventiveness, providing a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man. Born in the working-class, partly Jewish Žižkov suburb of Prague to a radical Socialist father and a conservative Catholic mother, Seifert embraced the avant-garde movements of his generation as a founding member of the Devětsil group before breaking definitively with the Communist Party in 1929 after signing a manifesto protesting Bolshevik tendencies in Czechoslovakia's Communist leadership. His subsequent career traced the full arc of twentieth-century Czech political tragedy: he wrote with quiet defiance during the Nazi occupation, was effectively silenced following the Communist takeover of 1948, and emerged in 1966 as the officially designated Poet of the Nation before being suppressed again after condemning the Soviet invasion of 1968. After spending nearly three decades as a dissident writer unable to publish new works in his own country, he became a signatory of the Charter 77 human rights petition in January 1977, and his Nobel Prize, received when he was eighty-three and in frail health, was understood internationally as both a literary honor and a pointed recognition of his lifelong moral courage.