Word: brno
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Second Youth. Janáček was born in 1854 in Moravia, now part of Czechoslovakia. He studied music in the town of Brno, married there (unhappily), suffered through the early death of his two children, and enjoyed no major success as a composer until he was 60. About that time, he fell in love with Kamila Stössl, 38 years his junior and the wife of an antique dealer. The affair was apparently platonic; nonetheless, it brought the composer an astonishingly productive second youth. From the time of his meeting with Kamila, his music surged with an energy...
Elsewhere in Czechoslovakia, there were both peaceful protests and violent riots. The situation was relatively calm in Bratislava, the scene of severe fighting in 1968, because police allowed the inhabitants to place flowers on the spots where a young Slovak had been killed by the invading Soviet tanks. In Brno, however, two consecutive nights of skirmishes left three demonstrators dead and at least 30 gravely injured...
...week's end, as an uneasy calm settled on Brno and the rest of Czechoslovakia, the government began to clamp tighter controls on the country. To justify the crackdown, Rude Prdvo, the Communist Party's paper, said that the riots were evidence of "counterrevolutionary activity as was known in Hungary in 1956." Many Czechoslovaks feared that the statement might presage mass political arrests and trials...
...bizarre and frightful contagion, no fewer than ten other young men, six inside Czechoslovakia and four elsewhere in Europe, set themselves ablaze in eight days following Palach's suicide. They included a 23-year-old Brno locksmith who burned himself in front of a memorial to Palach; a 24-year-old Czechoslovak serving time for robbery; and a 35-year-old Austrian dairy worker who had just been dismissed from his job. None apparently acted from political motives, and several had previous records of suicide attempts. Local authorities could only speculate that they thought they could somehow achieve Palach...
Czechoslovakia's national television network also juggled its beams from one location to another, always keeping one jump ahead of Soviet search parties. At one point, announcers were broadcasting from the city planetarium in the Moravian city of Brno. Crowed an engineer: "The Russians have plenty of tanks, but tanks cannot detect signals." Having learned just that, the Soviet commander in Moravia became so incensed at the persistent television coverage that he threatened to level the town if the station stayed on the air. Technicians thereupon switched off, temporarily. Meanwhile, cameramen were stuffing Bolex gear under their raincoats...