Novel
Kříž u potoka
Not translated into English
Karolina Světlá · 1868
Synopsis
Raised by a miller and his wife who took her in, Evička loves books and dreams of a mission. She is told of the curse of the Potocký family: an ancestress, Józa, married against her heart, cursed the family and killed herself by the stream, where a stone cross was set up, and since then no Potocký has been happy in love. It is near this cross that Štěpán Potocký asks her to marry him; against the advice of her own people, she accepts, determined to break the curse through her fidelity. But the husband tires of her books, is jealous of their daughter, and his brother Ambrož, taciturn, grows attached to her.
Context
The second of the Ještěd novels, written a year after the first, the book appeared at the end of 1868 in the Matice lidu, the popular series that the society for cheap Czech books published in Prague. The author drew the plot and the characters from the accounts of her acquaintances in the region, and set the action in places she had travelled through. The novel was adapted for the screen twice: in 1921 by Jan S. Kolár, a silent film of thirty-six minutes, and in 1937, with Jiřina Štěpničková in the role of Evička.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred and thirty pages in its first edition. Józa's story is told to Evička by her adoptive parents. No French or English translation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by literary histories as its author's best and most vivid novel, it is also her best-known book.