WORLD WORLDWIDE CZECH News Journal Update - (en) Czech, AFED: Karel Pelant (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Hashek 2023: Hashek left no stone unturned. Even the co-founder of Free

Thoughts did not escape his humor. ---- He is like mercury, and
resembles those elder figures who, before Christmas, on the boards in
Ovocná Street, bounced at the touch, while the salesmen shouted into the
streets in a terrible voice: "No one will put him on his head!" Friend
Pelante! Perhaps you will forgive me for this introduction, which ended
with a comparative theory when equipping your character. But whenever I
think of you, I see your lively little figure vividly before me, old
revolutionary!
Because there were times when in a cafe where pilsner was also on tap,
when everyone had already left, a small man with a fiddle sat alone,
drinking pilsner and singing Marseillais to the quiet, deserted bar!

He was Karel Pelant, a mystic, an anti-alcoholic, an atheist, an
exterminator, a man fighting against prostitution and a revolutionary, a
leader of thinking souls who argue in cafes, debating at small tables
outside the cafe windows so that they can be seen from the street, they
are proud, enthusiastic , bursting with intoxicating glory above
themselves, destroying worlds over black coffee, raising new banners.

And what of all this? Now, my friend Pelant, you are writing anecdotes
in South Moravia for which my grandfather was fired from the Primate
because they were old, you are sitting in the editorial office of the
Pilsen realistic paper, making bad epigrams and somewhere near Shkvrnany
on the hillside you are reminiscing about your fruitful life, when they
wrote about you in St. Vojtech, when did you take the Lord from old
pensioners, candlestick ladies, money changers, churchmen, when you were
in Volná mýslenka and sneered at ministers at public meetings.

Poor Pelante! Fate brought you to Pilsen, even with your secret sin, of
being an apparent abstinent and loving Pilsen beer at the same time!

And it must be a terrible fight in Pilsen. To be a realist, to lecture
about abstinence, to be in the anti-alcohol league, to show pictures of
the liver, stomach and kidneys of a drinker with a ski opticon around
the halls, and to be in Pilsen, at the direct source of one's secret sin.

In Prague, you could rather get lost, Prague could rather swallow you up
in a secluded pub, but in Pilsen, where you want to break ground for
realists by fighting alcoholism, a glass of Pilsen beer remains a sweet
dream and you desperately whisper to the soda water: "My God!"

And that's what you say, old atheist!

Where are the times when you made a study trip to America as a delegate
of Free Thought. Nobody saw you there, you old sinner!

You certainly drank "ale" in bars there and returned to Europe with five
revolvers in your pockets, ostentatiously calling yourself "goddam" and
"master".

But we still don't understand why Prague's Free Thought sent Pelant to
America.

What was he supposed to do there? Should he perhaps take back to the
recently baptized Indians the god whom they had so deliciously obtained
even with the fire water, but then he would have to give them twice as
much of the liquor, and they would return to their eighteen gods, with
whom Pelant would have worse work than with one?

Was Pelant supposed to collect contributions for Czech Free Thought from
cowboys on the prairies, or turn some furious Methodist into an atheist,
or gain ground in America for the efforts of Czech realists?

Pelant himself said that it was a promotional trip. But there were
people who claimed that the Free Thought sent him to America to get rid
of him in this wise, because the good Karel Pelant did not stop thinking
freely even - in the Free Thought.

They sent their illegitimate child there just as Podlipný or Masaryk and
other important figures in the Czech nation sent them there.

But unfortunately, Pelant did not get lost in America...

It was published in the magazine Karikatury, Vol. 3, large ed., No. 7,
13 February 1911. Unsigned.

Note:
Karel Pelant (1874-1925) - a journalist who was one of the founders of
Free Thought, to which he contributed to the magazine of the same name;
he also became famous as one of the pioneers of Esperanto.

https://www.afed.cz/text/8042/karel-pelant
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