Season 52: Then Came a Kiss on the Lips

Anton Chekhov – The Seagull (Artur, 2015. Translated by Leoš Suchařípa)

Loneliness

Lonely people are usually not lonely because of some ugly deformity, bad odor, or insufferability—after all, there are support and social groups for people with those traits today. Lonely people tend to be lonely because they are unwilling to pay the psychological price of living among others. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

David Foster Wallace – E Unibus Pluram – television and U.S. fiction (Abacus, 1998. Translated by Jana Vaverková)

Cultural Decline

Ever since the European migrant crisis in 2015 at the latest, we have been "warned" by populist politicians that a decline of culture and the values associated with it is coming. What is meant by this culture is, of course, left to chance, or patched over with something completely vague. For any skeptics, it is worth remembering in this context that jazz was once considered a decline (see the critique by T. W. Adorno), and fifty years earlier, Nietzsche warned against the "decadent" Wagner (see The Case of Wagner), but this is not just a phenomenon specific to the industrial age—Caravaggio was accused by his colleague Baglione of denying the spirit of art by imitating reality too closely. When one reflects on this decline of the past, one discovers a flourishing.

Desire

There is a man in the costume department of a Berlin theater. He is Italian. He is a woman. A woman who loves me, and maybe doesn't love me, but looks at me after the premiere of the opera Carmen like a man who loves me.

Dora Kaprálová – Winter Book About Love (Archa, 2014)

Falling in Love

And yet I’m going for it again, even though I know it’s going to hurt.

Self-Presentation

I ask myself whether I should—even if unasked—declare who I am. But I don't know how, really, or why…

Max Frisch – I'm Not Stiller (Odeon, 1970. Translated by Bohumil Černík)

Recognition

I look so hungry, but I look so good

Tap on my vein, suck on my diamond blood

Choke on the fame and hope it gets you high

Sit in the front row, watch the princess die

Lady Gaga – Perfect Celebrity (Mayhem, 2025)

Ambition

I would love to stage all of Shakespeare’s plays at once and present them in a single evening

one single amazing concentration of Shakespeare

Thomas Bernhard – Claus Peymann and Hermann Beil on the Sulzweise (Arts and Theatre Institute, 2011. Translated by Barbora Schnelle)

Obsession

I want to bite into you like a rodent

I want to curse you from the spring

like fermented apricots in milk*

Take a breath

Can you feel it?

The soft buttery yellow scent of pepper

in the haze of you

I am somewhere

I don't know where

but I feel good

how much I want you

some more

I’ll sprinkle you with chives

and I lick

with my tongue

with lizard-like excitement

*with raven foam, mustard tongue, salmon roe and dill leaf and paprika longing and coniferous purée and a sweet-and-salty brush against your foot

Hate on social media

a jungle of incorrectness, 

ragebait for the sensitive, 

hate feeding aching souls, 

a cheerful uncorking of emotions, 

the freedom to slash at one's neighbor, 

an endless right-wing paradise, 

(civic engagement in anonymity), 

confrontation from the safety of one's bed, 

let the pain out!

Death and finitude

festina lente! – make haste slowly!

Italo Calvino – Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Prostor, 1999. Translated by M. M. Jilský)

Homelessness (Russia–France–England)

What is Europe? What is Asia? Perhaps these are no longer appropriate questions for us in the 21st century: because such inquiry risks falling back into the "return" of earlier centuries by seeking the essence of a nation or culture, celebrated and enforced by "great political leaders." We must reorient ourselves, but that does not mean we can return to the divide between East and West. We must become post-Europeans and embrace homelessness. The position of homelessness will force us to recognize the other, who is just as homeless as we are.

Yuk Hui: Post-Europe (Karolinum, 2026. Translated by Martin Pokorný)

War

…

The Poverty of Artists 

Artists have created their most beautiful works when they were hungry.

Miloš Zeman (2020)

Motherhood

I always bring him something—cashews, dates, raspberries, or even little gifts, books, Arsène Lupin, The Vicomte of Bragelonne, an Adidas t-shirt, a Velcro wallet, a keychain with a compass. He always says it’s awesome, smiles, gives me a kiss, Thanks, Mom, touches my hand, my arm, leans his shoulder against me.

Love Me Tender – Constance Debré (Tranzit, 2025. Translated by Petra Zikmundová)

The Joy of Storytelling

In the 1960s, the great storyteller began to go through the biggest crisis since its inception, which, following Milan Kundera, can be traced back to Cervantes and his Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. For many years, it was replaced by the storyteller of the everyday, focusing on small-scale history. In recent years, this paradigm has been significantly disrupted by authors who rely on a strongly personal, "true-to-life" narrative. Yet, in today’s polarized world, even this approach has not brought the hoped-for unity. That is why it is good to leave the battlefield of storytellers and discover storytelling itself. To let it affect us and find the unceasing, boundless joy of storytelling that encompasses falls and flights, blurs the line between truth and fiction, and allows us to rediscover the path to lived reality. And, of course, one cannot overlook the obligatory fact that theater was born precisely from (joyful) storytelling around a fire. 

Shakespeare 

LEAR Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head!
And thou, all-shaking thunder,
flatten it with a single blow!
Crack, Nature, and destroy the seed,
from which ingrates are born!

William Shakespeare: King Lear (Atlantis, 2023. Translated by Martin Hilský)

Forms of Love

Love is endless! – My love is disappointed!

Karel Hynek Mácha – May (Jiránek, 1945)

Liberal feminism

I sacrificed my peace of mind for that dream—feminism. And I decided that today I would be honest. This revolution, in which I placed so much hope, will be won by arms-dealing feminists. Heteronormative feminists. Feminists who cling to the importance of bosses, feminists hungry for promotions, bonuses, success, and social recognition. Feminists who support the police, condemnation, and class discrimination. Identitarians. Self-proclaimed saints. In other words, it is a feminism of respectable, well-groomed, moralizing prison guards.

Virginie Despentes – King Kong Theory (Vyšehrad, 2025. Translated by Petra Zikmundová)

Reconciliation 

We express the hope that, based on the knowledge of historical events and their consequences, it will no longer be possible for similar things to happen in Brno, and that we will keep the events of May 1945 in our memory as a grim memento. We also express the wish that all past grievances may be forgiven and that, unburdened by the past, we may turn toward a common future in mutual cooperation.

Declaration of Reconciliation and a Common Future (May 19, 2015)

Actresses and writers

Actresses act and writers write. Actresses send emails and writers pay for their actions. Writers write for the theater and actresses don't like the results. Actresses tell stories from their youth and writers listen in order to write them down. Actresses giggled and writers grew uneasy. Then came the kisses on the mouth.

Addiction

That addiction was primarily a search for oblivion. A need to forget everything, to go through all those spasms, just so we could be ourselves for a few hours.

Keith Richards, James Fox – Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010. Translated by Jana Vaverková)

Doubles and mirroring 

Confrontation with our doubles inevitably raises existentially unsettling questions. Am I who I think I am, or who others think I am? And if enough other people start thinking of me as someone else, then who am I really? The existence of doubles is, of course, not the only way we lose control over ourselves. A carefully constructed self can be destroyed in many ways—due to an accident that causes disability, a psychotic episode, a hacked account, or deepfake technology. That is the eternal appeal of doubles in novels and films: the idea that two people can be indistinguishable touches on the insecurity at the core of identity—the painful truth that no matter how carefully we curate our personal lives and public image, the person we think we are is fundamentally defenseless against forces beyond our control.

Naomi Klein – Doppelganger (Alarm, 2025. Translated by Tereza Stejskalová)

Inability to connect

Dating is over. Men haven't managed to emancipate themselves, and women refuse to tolerate it anymore – Page Not Found

Are all single men really idiots? – Alarm

Dating 4.0? You can find a "unicorn" if you don't give up and have a little patience – Deník N

We clearly all have the same dating troubles. And I say thanks for the advice, I'd rather stay single – Heroine

Is dating hard for women today? Probably, but the data also shows the cruelty men face – Hospodářské noviny

To bite into

When you have a blackout of the heart, that you find it so beautiful and also true, yes, it is true, only love hides in the dark, and that sometimes you also feel like you're falling apart. (...) Back then I was sure you were in love, and I didn't know whether to be beside myself with joy or to put you on the rack and drag all your little secrets out of you.

Lucas Rijneveld – My Heavenly Favorite (Argo, 2024. Translated by Veronika ter Harmsel Havlíková)

To succumb

So when it happens to me that I succumb, it is because there is no longer any place for me here, not even in death. The image of the other – whom I clung to, for whom I lived – is no longer here; sometimes it is a catastrophe (a petty one) which, it seems to me, has distanced that image from me forever, sometimes it is an excess of happiness that allows me to merge with it; in any case, whether separated or merged, I cannot pull myself together anywhere; there is nothing here, neither I, nor you, nor death, no one, to whom I could speak.

Roland Barthes – A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (Marvart, 2008. Translated by Čestmír Pelikán)

To Scream

The crystal dewdrops around us shivered and chimed, that was how loudly he screamed. She gave me a fleeting kiss on the cheek. Then she evaporated; I’ve never seen a woman run so fast. She didn’t thank me, didn’t look back – and she was gone before I could even think it over. And that was the closest I ever came to marital bliss, thank you very much.

Angela Carter – Wise Children (Dybbuk, 2007. Translated by Lucie Mikolajková, Martin Mikolajek)

To Speak

I have convinced myself many times that everything important to me must also be spoken, verbalized, and shared with others, despite the risk that it may not be understood and could even be attacked. That when I speak, it has, among other things, a beneficial effect on me.

(…)

The cause of this silence is that each of us carries her own fear – fear of contempt, criticism, judgment, fear that someone will really see us, fear of challenges or death. But most of all, in my opinion, we fear visibility, without which, however, one cannot truly live.

Audre Lorde – Sister Outsider (Tranzit, 2021. Translated by Markéta Musilová)

Insatiable Love

Let us live, my Lesbia, and love,

and value the grumbling of stern old men

at no more than a single penny!

Suns may set and rise again; 

but when our brief light has set,

a single night of eternal sleep awaits us.

Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred,

then another thousand, then a second hundred,

then another thousand, and then a hundred more.

Once we have kissed thousands of times,

we will mix them up, so we don't know,

and so no envious person can begrudge us,

knowing how many kisses there are.

Insatiable Love; Catullus – Triumvirs of Love (SNKLU, 1964. Translated by Otakar Smrčka, Rudolf Mertlík)

Then came the kiss on the lips

Ciao

Amore mio

Das war echt damals da ganz gut mit dir im Kino

Wir haben San Pellegrino getrunken

Und haben uns ziemlich gut gefunden und

Dann kam das Bussi auf den Mund und

Ich sag: „Ciao“

Das magst du nicht

Also schnurrst du: „Geh noch nicht!“

Aber ich run, so schnell ich kann

Da, die Tränen fließen an mich ran

Ich ruf: „Ciao-au, I have to go-oh“

Aber ich hab's im Heart, du, ich

Und das Pellegrino

Translation: 

Ciao

My love

That time at the cinema with you was actually pretty nice

We were drinking San Pellegrino

And we really hit it off and

Then came a kiss on the lips and

I say: "Ciao"

You don't like that

So you purr: "Don't go yet!"

But I run away as fast as I can

And tears are streaming down my cheeks

I shout: "Ciao-au, I have to go-oh"

But I have it in my heart, you, me

And Pellegrino

Fuffifufzich – Ciao amore mio (Heartbreakerei, 2022. Translation by Justina Grecová)