The Society of Jesus

The conflict of conscience with power and ideology

The debut novel by the poet of the May generation, Jiří Šotola, The Fellowship of Jesus (1969), already in the year of its first publication, reveals the historical parallel hidden in the story, set in the period of the forced re-Catholicization of the Czech lands. Father Vojtěch Had, boundlessly devoted to the dogmatism of the Jesuit order, gradually compromises his goals and ideals until he becomes disillusioned that instead of spreading the word of God on the Košumberk estate, he has blindly served completely different powers his entire life. A narrative steeped in skepticism, irony, and relativization does not need heroic gestures and pathetic exclamations to recall the traumas of our nation. On the contrary, the focus is on the individual fates of those who uncritically identified with the suggested ideology and realized their mistake too late, or converted out of fear or personal gain and obediently submitted to totalitarian repression. Šotol' s novel about a " little man" gripped by the power system of " big history" was extremely positively received not only by contemporary domestic criticism, but soon also by foreign and exile critics, and finally by post-November critics, which testifies to the timelessness of its message. The text for the publication was prepared and commented by Erik Gilk.