“My mum was in Holice; she’s in the photo that I don’t have but it’s in the document. She can be seen in the square with a baby bump – I wasn’t born yet. Within half an hour of taking that picture, my dad was gone; what a tragedy for my mum. It was a gathering of the partisans before their departure to the borderland. All of a sudden – bang. Nobody knows to this day who did it; Doubek says it was fired from a pistol, some say it was a rifle. Mum was certain it was fired from a window of the King Jiří of Poděbrady Hotel right at the moment they fired the salvo of honour. Nobody knows for sure. Some witnesses said there was a Jeep parked nearby, which then drove away to Vysoké Mýto with NKVD officers on board. In my opinion, it had something to do with Tůma who was also with NKVD.”
“They heard some noise – that was the Wehrmacht taking the surroundings of Licoměřice and the little forest where Fomin was headquartered; it was bad. They ran and didn’t know where; they hid in a barn under hay. Luckily, it wasn’t Mayor Šmíd’s barn. When the Nazis had taken the village, they interrogated the villagers brutally. They sent many of them to Terezín and many perished there. It was such a tragedy. The partisans heard everything – they were hidden in the barn, with grenades unfused and ready to die. They heard the Nazis beating Mayor Šmíd and asking him where the partisans were. He begged for them not to beat him; he knew nothing. They hit him so hard and he was screaming. When the Nazis concluded that he really didn’t know anything, they set his barn on fire. They thought the partisans were hiding in it. The barn burned down; they thought they’d find dead bodies inside but found nothing; the partisans were hiding next door. It was providence, coincidence, sheer luck.”
“It was amazing – the first ever Miss contest. The girls wore just swimsuits and walked a T-shaped catwalk at the Julius Fučík centre – straight on, then left, then right. The crowd was just insane – their eyes wide open at all the eroticism; Hrabal wrote that the crowd actually slurped the women with their eyes. The girls felt insecure; they would walk to the right but not to the left because it was too much for them. You know, you’re facing a crowd of a thousand people screaming and whistling at you, and you’ve got nothing but a swimsuit on. On top of that, there was Ginsberg, crashing his little cymbals and chanting Hare Krishna, Hare Rama. The girls didn’t want to walk to the left, but he made them and they had to go. But it was amazing. Then he recited a poem along the lines of, ‘the sky is full of stars tonight, the constellations, Vega will kiss its stars, and kisses between celestial bodies and breasts…’ The people loved it as it was being translated.”
“There was an exhibition titled the Treasures of the Santori Museum. Santori is a Japanese firm that makes great whisky. So, to improve their karma – after all, they make alcohol that destroys human souls – they collect Japanese applied art, which is amazing. Japan has a fantastic relationship to applied art: for them, a Rembrandt painting is equal in value to a beautifully crafted medication case – this little thing you put on your belt. In the Louvre, there is a beautiful spoon shaped like a feminine body, and it has the same value as ‘high art’. There is no ‘noble’ or ‘profane’ art in Japan. Seeing this Japanese art exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow was an amazing experience.”
Konstantin Korovin was born in Týniště nad Orlicí on 7 June 1945. His mother Anežka Korovinová had been a member of the resistance movement in the Holice area since 1943. His father Konstantin Alexievich Korovin was a Soviet partisan and the commander of the 5th section of the Jan Hus Brigade. A partisan parade was held in the main square in Holice in May 1945, and Commander Korovin was shot dead during a salvo. His murderer was never found. His son was born posthumously. Under the influence of stories about his father, Konstantin joined the Jan Žižka Military School in Bratislava at 11 years of age. Having graduated, however, he decided not to continue at the Higher Military School in Vyškov, opting to study art history at the Charles University instead. In Prague, he embraced the relaxed atmosphere of the 1960s. He read art magazines, went to cinemas and theatres (most notably Viola), and made friends with poet Václav Hrabě. He was compelled to interrupt his studies and take up a worker job in order to pay his military school tuition fees. Following the invasion in 1968, he organised protests in Kostelec nad Orlicí. He founded the Phoenix Youth Club where he organised political discussions, film screenings, lectures and independent artists’ performances. In 1969, he was admitted to the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Brno to study art history. He was kicked out during the early normalisation period over his civic activities during the Warsaw Pact armies’ occupation. He had to ‘redeem’ his ‘guilt’ working as a roof tiler. Two years later, he was allowed back. Following graduation, he could not find a job due to his ‘right-wing’ past. He had to take up a worker job again, this time in the Skuhrov forge. He eventually found a job at the Regional Culture Centre in Hradec Králové as a decorative art methodologist. He was interrogated by the StB in connection with Charter 77. Following the Velvet Revolution, he became the director of the Orlická Gallery in Rychnov nad Kněžnou. When it merged with the Modern Art Gallery seated at the Rychnov chateau, he opened a classical and jazz music shop and ran it until retirement. In addition to fine art, he also became enamoured of Japan. He undertook the Shikoku Pilgrimage of Japanese monasteries over the course of several months and earned the Henro honorary title. He was living in his house in Kostelec nad Orlicí in 2023.
Official launch of Karel Gutmann’s exhibition at the Orlická Gallery in Rychnov nad Kněžnou, the witness is captured with Supreme Rabbi Karol Sidon, 1994
Official launch of Karel Gutmann’s exhibition at the Orlická Gallery in Rychnov nad Kněžnou, the witness is captured with Supreme Rabbi Karol Sidon, 1994
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