Bronislava Volková

Her father Štěpán Fischer was a machine engineer.[1][2] and her mother Markéta Morenová (pseudonym Gita Morenová) was a violin virtuoso.[3] Volková grew up in Prague, where she went to primary and secondary school. In 1969, she graduated the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University with an M.A. in Russian and Spanish.[4] A year later, she obtained a doctorate from Slavic and General linguistics. Because she refused to enter the Communist party, she was forbidden to defend her dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Sciences.[5] This was one of the reasons she opted to leave for exile.[6] Between 1974 and 1976, she lived in Cologne, West Germany. Later she moved to the United States of America. She was condemned to year and a half in prison for leaving Czechoslovakia without permission.

She taught at six universities in three different countries, e.g. University of Cologne, University of Marburg, University of Virginia and Harvard University. Her home university eventually became Indiana University Bloomington,[5][7] where she taught since 1982 in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and for thirty years led the Czech program.[7] She became a Full Professor in 1991.

She is the author of many academic articles and two monographs from linguistic and literary semiotics: Emotive Signs in Language (1987)[8] and A Feminist's Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature (1997).[9][10] Her newest work is a book of essays Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought:Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America (2021),[11] Czech version Podoby exilu v židovské literatuře a myšlení: Střední Evropa ve dvacátém století a přesun do Ameriky (2022).[12] Between the years 1976 and 1992, her work appeared under the name Bronislava Volek.[7]

Volková contributed to theory and structure of emotive signs and meanings,[13] developing differences between emotivity, expressivity, intensity and values, to Russian word-formation, pragmatics, etc. She has also worked on functions of linguistic repetition in Russian and Spanish dialogue, levels of emphasis in Russian, Spanish and Czech syntax and other semiotic topics.

Apart from her linguistic analyses, she has applied her semiotic theory to the work of important Czech authors[14] (Mácha, Kundera, Němcová, Hrabal,[15] Čapek, Havel and others). Her literary analyses focus on gender, responsibility, guilt, innocence, racism, nationalism, eurocentrism, relationship between private and public sphere, escape and vision, death and other topics.[7] She also analyzed poetry on the basis of emotive signs and meanings, characterizing the poetics of individual authors or poems via typology and frequency of emotive signs used. Her work was reviewed in a number of countries and parts of it were translated into Czech, Russian, German and Spanish.

During her academic career, Volková taught courses and led investigations from many different fields,[7] including general linguistics, Slavic studies, theater, comparative literature, philosophy, history, folklore, Jewish studies, communication and culture, semiotics, cognitive linguistics and literary translation.

Besides her scholarly work, Volková is also a poet. Her poetry appears in journals, anthologies, websites, as well as poetry collections. It has existential, reflective and spiritual character. Since 1999, her poetry appears in bilingual, Czech-English form.[16] She has also participated in many international anthologies of poetry and lectured at many universities around the world. Her poetry was reviewed by famous authors of various nationalities, e.g. Bohumil Hrabal,[17] Miroslav Holub, Arnošt Lustig, W.S. Merwin, Willis Barnstone, Petr Král, Igor Hochel,[18] Atanas Zvezdinov, Aleksandr Karpenko and many others.[19][20][21]

Another area of Volková's work is poetry translation. She has translated many poets from Czech to English, from other Slavic languages into Czech and from Spanish into Russian or Czech. She has authored two books of translations of her own poetry from Czech to Russian and an extensive anthology of Czech poets in English (Po hřbetě ďábla / Up the Devil's Back).[22]

She has also authored stories and essays, especially on the theme of exile in both languages. Volková is a member of Czech and American PEN club[23] and a recipient of various international cultural and literary awards.

Apart from literary and scholarly work, she engages in creation of collages, which she uses both as illustrations and covers of poetry books, as well as in exhibitions and multimedia shows.