Tegtmaierovy elezrny – Komunistick romn Schulz Karel (2026)

This debut novel by Karel Schulz, who is still best known for the celebrated novel Stone and Pain, was published in 1922, twenty years before that later work. The story follows a man who rises from poverty to become the owner of a large ironworks company. In his struggle for profit, pursued in the name of a future, technically and socially better-organized iron world, he comes into fierce conflict with the interests of his workers, whose wages allow them only to survive from payday to payday. Schulz was then a member of the left-wing artistic group Devtsil, and he wrote this novel during the socially turbulent years of 1920 and 1921, marked by the general strike of December 1920, demonstrations during which fourteen workers were shot while being suppressed, the subsequent breakaway of the left wing of the Social Democratic Party, and the founding of the Communist Party. The book is in Czech.