Search - Stephen Ng :: Leos Janacek: The Diary Of One Who Vanished

Twenty-three anonymous poems entitled From the Pen of a Self-taught Peasant, which appeared in the popular Brno daily paper published on two consecutive Sundays. Being a subscriber and regular contributor, Janácek had come across these verses (written in the Valachian dialect) and apparently took them with him to Luhacovice on his annual spa holiday in July 1917. For a long time the authorship remained a mystery, and it was not until recently that Ozef Kalda, an obscure Moravian poet, was confirmed as the author of the cycle. According to Mirka Zemanová, the author of the most recent Janácek biography, Kalda had written to a friend in 1916 stating that he had contributed the text to the paper. Unfortunately the letter lay buried among his friend's family papers for over eighty years. In 1997 the letter was discovered by a local historian; since then Kalda has been quoted as the poet. -- The main character in Zápisník zmizelého is a farmer's teenage son named Janík, who has met a young gypsy girl named Zefka. At first he resists her tempting, beautiful eyes by sending her away. Late one day he wanders into the woods to cut a peg for his cart and finds Zefka. She teases and seduces the shy youth by showing him that "not all her skin has been darkened by the sun." He succumbs and makes love with her in the forest. From that moment on, although he is angry at himself for betraying his moral beliefs and bringing shame to his family by falling in love with a lower class woman, he looks forward to every night when he can go to the woods and be with Zefka. According to Thomas Acord's dissertation on the cycle, when Janík finally realizes that the gypsy is bearing his son, he decides to leave his family to be with her and live his life from then on as a gypsy.