Rudolf Křesťan (14 March 1943 to 15 October 2026) was a Czech journalist, editor and writer who was widely called the king of the Czech feuilleton. Over more than six decades he published short, gently humorous prose pieces about everyday life in magazines, on radio and television, and in about twenty books that sold more than a quarter of a million copies. He died in Prague on the morning of 15 October 2026 after a short illness, aged 83.
Křesťan was born in Prague during the German occupation. His father worked in commerce and his mother kept house. He spent his childhood in Stará Role, then a village and today part of Karlovy Vary, and he returned to it again and again in his writing. His mother died when he was sixteen. He attended the gymnasium in Karlovy Vary, passing his school-leaving exam in 1960, and was already writing for print: the Dictionary of Czech Literature after 1945 dates his debut to 1958 in the daily Mladá fronta, and he said his first feuilleton, published when he was sixteen, was about castle guides who make things up.
From 1960 to 1966 he studied journalism at Charles University in Prague, where the journalist and teacher František Gel, who had reported on the Nuremberg trials, encouraged his interest in the feuilleton. Voice training with the actor Milan Neděla helped him overcome a childhood difficulty pronouncing the letter r, a skill he later relied on when reading his own work on air.
In 1964 Křesťan joined the youth weekly Mladý svět, where he would stay for almost three decades. He worked first on the culture desk, then as a reporter, and from 1986 in the readers' letters department. He later said that reporting for Mladý svět, a relatively free-thinking magazine in the 1960s, gave him the life experience a feuilletonist needs. As a reporter he visited more than fifty countries on four continents, reported from Hiroshima, helped build a hospital in Sudan, and for stories took LSD and tried to stay awake for 100 hours. In 1990 he became deputy editor-in-chief and was elected chairman of the board of the newly formed Mladý svět joint-stock company.
His first book, Kos a kosínus (1969), was a collection of poems and short prose made with the cartoonist Vladimír Renčín. He also wrote scripts for comics drawn by Kája Saudek, including Pepík Hipík (1969) and the strip Čtverylka (1971). In 1976 he published Budeš v novinách with his former teacher František Gel, and in 1980 came his first feuilleton collection, Myš v 11. patře (A Mouse on the 11th Floor), with an afterword by Miroslav Horníček. Further collections followed every few years, among them Slepičí krok, Kočky v patách, Co láká poškoláka, Pozor, hodný pes!, Nebuď labuť!, Podkovaná blecha, Kachna v bazénu, Jsem z toho jelen, Co mají Skotové pod sukní and Jako husa do flašky. His twentieth book, Tajemné kotě (2018), gathered 95 feuilletons. Animals run through the titles and the texts alike.
After leaving Mladý svět he worked from 1993 to 2003 as an editor at Týdeník Televize, and from 1992 to 2000 he was one of the presenters of the Czech Television programmes Nedělní ráno and Seniorklub. From 2003 he was freelance, writing for Literární noviny and other titles and becoming a familiar voice on Czech Radio, where he contributed to Psáno kurzívou and co-presented the three-hour Sunday show Dobré ráno s Dvojkou. In 2009 he released a CD of 33 of his feuilletons read in his own voice. Some of his texts were also recorded by Petr Nárožný and, in Slovakia, by Milan Lasica and Július Satinský.
Critics praised the craft behind the lightness. The Dictionary of Czech Literature after 1945 described feuilletons that, through humorous exaggeration, wordplay, nonsense and mischief, argue with life's stereotypes and find poetry in the ordinariness of small things, with wit growing from a feeling for the subtleties and absurdities of language. His models were Jan Neruda, Karel Čapek and Karel Poláček, and he admired Horníček and František Nepil as readers of their own work. In 2018 he estimated that he had written about 2,800 feuilletons, overtaking Neruda's 2,260, of which some 1,400 had appeared in book form. When Kachna v bazénu appeared, the presenter Marek Eben called him the king of the Czech feuilleton. In 2014 he won the Miloslav Švandrlík Prize for the best humorous book of the year for Proč nemám pistoli. His texts found their way into school textbooks and university theses.
Křesťan was widowed young and raised two daughters on his own. After eight years as a widower, when he was past fifty, he met the academic painter, graphic artist and teacher Magdalena Křesťanová. They married, and from 1995 her drawings illustrated his books. He called her his first reader, who knew every text from its very beginning. His son-in-law is the journalist Petr Šabata.
He lived by a motto he gave to Czech Radio: get rid of illusions so that you do not lose your ideals. Colleagues remembered him as modest, unusually attentive and generous. His death was announced to ČTK on behalf of the family by Petr Šabata. The farewell ceremony will be held on Friday 23 October 2026 at 10:20 in the New Ceremony Hall at Olšany Cemeteries in Prague.
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From social media
4Posts by Rudolf, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.