Although Jirí Orten was only twenty-two when he died in 1941, he left behind a significant body of work, especially poetry. Orten belonged to the "war generation," writers who began working at the end of the 1930s and set themselves in opposition to the previous generation of avant-garde writers. Partly because of the author's early death, Orten's poetry was regarded with almost cultlike devotion after World War II; young poets used it as a source of inspiration into the 1970s.

Orten was born Jirí Ohrenstein on 30 August 1919 in the ancient town of Kutná Hora in central Bohemia to Eduard and Berta Orten, née Rosenzweig. His father was a middle-class businessman, and his mother was an actress in the local amateur theater. Orten's uncle on his mother's side, Josef Rosenzweig-Moir, had been an anarchist poet at the beginning of the twentieth century. Orten's older brother...