JOSEPH SVATOPLUK MACHAR
(Born February 29, 1864, in Kolin.)
Machar spent his youth in Brandýs on the Elbe, which calm and lovely country he often describes in his poems and stories. After completing his course at the gymnasium in Prague and fulfilling his required military service he became, in 1891, a bank official in Vienna, where he lived until the outbreak of the world war, during the early period of which he was imprisoned on information furnished by the Austrian spy system, which asserted that a revolutionary, anti-Austrian poem of Machar’s had been published in a Czech paper in the United States. The exigencies to which the spy system was put to trump up a case was well shown in the Machar affair, for the poem was indeed published in the United States, but it had previously appeared many times in Bohemia without giving offense to the Hapsburg government. In the newly organized Czechoslovak Republic, Machar has just been appointed General-Inspector of the Czechoslovak Army.
Machar’s proximity to the Austrian capital and his distance from Prague gave him at once an insight into the clouded whirlpool of the empire’s politics and a perspective on the life of his own countrymen, which a
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