Vladimír Boudník a myšlenka míru
Vladimír Boudník and the Idea of Peace

Summary/Abstract: The Prague-born artist and writer Vladimír Boudník (1924–1968) apprenticed as a toolmaker. In 1943, as a student at a technical college, he was sent to the Third Reich to do forced labour for the Germans. From there, he wrote home to his mother. His letters and diary entries are a valuable source, sketching the conditions in which young Czechs sent to do forced labour in Dortmund lived and worked. Boudník returned to wartime events also after coming home to Bohemia. While attending the State School of Graphic Art (Státní grafická škola v P raze), he published, at his own expense, the appeals ‘Národům’ (To the nations, 1947), in which he seeks to warn against another possible war. His art theory, explosionalismus, which he published in 1949, also developed out of his wartime experiences. He sought to create art that would ‘survive all human catastrophes’. Throughout his life, Boudník strived to change the thinking of people and subsequently society as a whole, so that war could never happen again. This effort pervades all the work he did in literature and art.

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