Plowshares into Swords

The first English-language translation of a classic Czech antiwar novel written in the wake of WWI.

Originally published in 1925, Tilled Fields and Battlefields is an expressionist antiwar novel in which Vladislav Vancura tells the story of the denizens of the Ouhrov estate in language as baroque as the manor that ties them all together. The fragmented narrative introduces the reader to such characters as the Baron Danowitz, his sons, his French concubine, the farmhand Frantisek Hora, and the mentally disabled murderer Reka in the autumn of 1913, before revealing their fates during World War I. Ranging from the peaceful farmlands of Bohemia to the battlefields of Galicia, taking in the pubs of Budapest and the hospitals of Krakow, the novel constitutes an unsentimental and naturalistic approach to the war that created Czechoslovakia. Tilled Fields and Battlefields is a stunning novel by one of Czech literature’s most important writers. This modernist masterpiece, reminiscent of the work of Isaac Babel and William Faulkner, is now available in English for the very first time.