Bronislava Volková

Bronislava Fischerová was born on 15 May 1946 in Děčín, Czechoslovakia. Both parents were of Jewish origin and had spent the war in exile. Her father, Štěpán Fischer (born 1905 in Trnava), was a Berlin-trained mechanical engineer and co-designer of the FRM (Fischer Reimann Motoren) prototype cars who served in the Czechoslovak army in France and then Britain, running workshops for a Czechoslovak tank battalion. His parents died in Auschwitz. Her mother, Markéta Fischerová (born Margit Morgenstern in Budapest in 1903), was a violinist who performed under the name Gita Morenová, fled across Europe to London in wartime and later led the string department of the Prague Conservatory. Her mother's sister died at Maly Trostinec. In all, 28 relatives from both families were killed in the Holocaust.

From 1946 the family lived in Prague-Vršovice, where her father worked for ČKD. He had joined the Communist Party during the war and remained a member until his death in 1988. The parents stopped speaking German at home, and Bronislava only learned of her Jewish background at about thirteen when classmates began insulting her. She remembered a happy childhood: "I was an adventurer, I loved making things up."

She attended primary and secondary schools in Vršovice and Strašnice and passed her school-leaving exams in 1963. She studied Russian and Spanish at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, with teachers she remembered fondly, including Karel Hausenblas, Ivan Poldauf and Vladimír Skalička. In 1967 and 1968 she spent two semesters at Leningrad State University, where she met translator Oleg Malevich and philologist Efim Etkind, returning to Prague just before the August 1968 invasion. She graduated in 1969 and received her PhDr. in Slavic and general linguistics in 1970 with a thesis on the functions of linguistic repetition in Russian and Spanish dialogue. In 1973 she completed every requirement for the Candidate of Sciences degree (dissertation: Russian Noun Derivatives with Emotive Meanings), but the regime refused to award it because she would not join the Communist Party.

After a postdoctoral post at Charles University (1969 to 1973) and a year teaching Russian at the University of 17 November, she and her husband left Czechoslovakia in 1974 on permission to attend a Hispanist congress in Bordeaux. They passed through the Zirndorf refugee camp in West Germany, and in Czechoslovakia were convicted in absentia of illegally leaving the republic, sentenced to 18 months and had their property confiscated. She taught at the University of Cologne (1975), where she had to learn to teach Old Church Slavonic in German within months, and at Marburg (1976).

In 1976 she moved to the United States. She was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard (1977 to 1978), visiting professor at Indiana University (1978 to 1980) and assistant professor at the University of Virginia (1980 to 1982). In 1982 she joined Indiana University Bloomington, gaining tenure in 1986 and becoming full professor of Slavic languages and literatures in 1991. She led the Czech program for thirty years and was adjunct professor of comparative literature (1992 to 2010) and Jewish studies (2005 to 2010). She held ACLS, IREX (Prague, 1989) and Fulbright (1990 to 1991) awards and was resident director of the CIEE program in Prague from 1999 to 2001. She retired as professor emerita in 2010.

Volková's linguistic work centred on emotive signs and meanings, separating emotivity, expressivity, intensity and value, and also covered Russian word formation, pragmatics, repetition in Russian and Spanish dialogue, and emphasis in Russian, Spanish and Czech syntax. She applied this semiotic framework to Czech literature, writing on Mácha, Němcová, Neruda, Čapek, Hrabal, Kundera and Havel, with attention to gender, guilt and innocence, racism, nationalism, Eurocentrism and death. Major books: Emotive Signs in Language and Semantic Functioning of Derived Nouns in Russian (John Benjamins, 1987), Czech Poets and Writers Reminisce and Envision (1991), A Feminist's Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature (Edwin Mellen, 1997), Up the Devil's Back / Po hřbetě ďábla, a bilingual anthology of 20th-century Czech poetry with Clarice Cloutier (Slavica, 2008), and Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought (Academic Studies Press, 2021; Czech edition Podoby exilu v židovské literatuře a myšlení, Pavel Mervart, 2022).

Her poems first appeared in 1984 through PmD (Poetry Abroad) in Munich with Motáky do uší pěny, followed by Dům v ohni (1985), Vzduch bez podpatků (1987) and Jistá nepřítomnost (1990). A selection appeared in English as The Courage of the Rainbow (Sheep Meadow Press, New York, 1993) and in Czech as Roztříštěné světy (Votobia, 1995). From 1999 she published bilingually: Proměny / Transformations, Vstup do světla / Entering Light (2002), Ze tmy zrozená / Born out of Darkness (2004 and 2005), A pít budem ze studní lahodných / And Drink We Will from Delectable Wells (2010 and 2011), Být stromem, který zpívá / Being a Tree that Sings (2016), and Kde všichni odcházejí a už se nevrací / Where Everyone Leaves Never to Return (2023). Her collected poems with collages, Vzpomínky moře, appeared in 2011. Selections were published in Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian, Slovak, German, Spanish and French.

She translated Czech poets into English, Slavic poetry into Czech and Spanish poetry into Russian, and translated her own work into English and Russian. Her collages illustrated her books and were shown in exhibitions and in multimedia performances combining projection, dance and music.

She married Emil Volek, a fellow Charles University graduate and literary scholar, in 1969, and emigrated with him in 1974. They divorced soon after arriving in the United States. No children have been documented publicly. She described exile as profoundly lonely and felt something of a stranger in both countries. She visited Prague on an IREX grant in early 1989 and attended dissident flat seminars, but did not find a suitable post at home after 1989. She returned permanently to the Czech Republic in 2018 and lived in Prague 6. She also trained in healing arts, listing herself as a healing arts practitioner alongside poet and visual artist.

She refused Communist Party membership even though it cost her a degree and an academic post, and recalled that in 1968, absorbed in linguistics, her husband teased her for being politically naive. Her writing returned again and again to exile, which she called incredibly stressful and a constant struggle, and to Jewish identity and memory after the Holocaust. Her later poetry took on a growing spiritual dimension, treating death as a gate to peace rather than an end.

Volková carried Czech literature to American students for three decades and her anthology Up the Devil's Back remains a key English-language gateway to 20th-century Czech poetry. Her theory of emotive signs was reviewed internationally and partly translated into Czech, Russian, German and Spanish. Her life story was recorded for the Memory of Nations (Paměť národů) oral history archive, and Anna Nadine Skorko's documentary From Prague to the World and Back (2021) was a Febiofest finalist.

George Gall Memorial Award, Systems Research Foundation, Baden-Baden (1988). Poet of Merit, American Poetry Association (1989). Award for Outstanding Contribution to Culture and Scholarship, Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, Prague (2009). Award for Lifetime Poetic Work and cultural exchange among Slavs, Syndicate of Bulgarian Teachers, Varna (2012). Prague Muse literary prize and translation diploma, European Congress of Writers (2016). Silver Medal, LiFFt International Festival, Baku (2019). Atanas Vanchev diploma for literary mastery, Kyiv (2022). Fellowships from Mellon, ACLS, IREX and Fulbright.

Petr Kotyk filmed her reading Hlas odjinud at the Viola in Prague (1991) and Proměny nepřítomnosti at the Czech PEN Club (2004). Her multimedia performances Entering Light (2003), Born out of Darkness (2005) and The Sea Recalls (2013) were filmed in Bloomington. A bilingual CD, The Slightest Reminder of Your Being (Thirty Years of Exile: 1974 to 2004), appeared in 2005. Anna Nadine Skorko's 2021 documentary exists in Czech (Z Prahy do světa a zpět), English, Russian and Spanish versions.

Bronislava Volková died on 29 October 2026, aged 80. Her death was announced by the Czech PEN Club, which remembered her as a poet and translator best known for existential and metaphysical poetry written in Czech and English, and recorded by the Memory of Nations archive. The place and cause of death have not been made public.