Forest Priest

A Treatise on Karel Klostermann, the Šumava Forests and Their People
(Together with František Krejčí and Pavel Hubený)

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In his novels from the late 19th century, Karel Klostermann captured the terrifying transformation of the Šumava forests: he describes how the original, almost untouched by man, green paradise turns into a wasteland, in which first the trees die and then the people.

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More than a hundred years after his death, a surprisingly large number of people still relate to these images of a landscape apocalypse - Klostermann's images of forest destruction still touch us.

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In this book, Pavel Hubený, together with František Krejčí, combine information from the history of people and forests and supplement it with often previously unpublished information from forestry records, in order to enable Klostermann's readers to understand the dynamics of the transformations of the Šumava forests - both at the time of his novels and today.

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Tereza Dobiášová Krejčí approaches Klostermann's work from a narrative perspective: she views his three pivotal Šumava novels as a trilogy about the crisis of the landscape caused by man and analyzes his relationship to places, characters, and the material described. Based on this analysis, she offers an interpretation of Klostermann as a distinctive “priest” of Šumava.

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Nominated for Šumava Litera Prize 2026