"But when I was still in the so-called 'hydrák', at the Water Management Institute, someone from my relatives abroad sent me a few pages from an emigrant magazine with poems by [Josef] Brodský, Roman Elegies. I was completely enchanted by it. He is the master of Russian classical verse, but he has, I would say, modernized it. I memorized it, I walked around with it in my head, I cooked with it, I shopped with it, I hiked in the mountains, and it was always ringing in my head. Although I was convinced that poems were basically untranslatable. I mean, most of the time they don't. I mean, you can, but it's got to be... someone who's either totally bilingual or really, really gifted. Like [Jan] Zábrana, for example. Zábranä's translations of Yesenin are brilliant. And then suddenly the Czech words started popping into my head. Suddenly I found out that it was possible. And now I was hooked, and I started translating it. And all that time there, all those plonk years, well, she wasn't exactly plonk because I was sitting in that Water Institute where I was doing office work, documentary work. Our work, honestly — we were done with it in two hours! But we stayed there until four, it was all on the time clock, from eight to four. So we read a lot. I’ve never read so much classical literature in my life as I did there. All my younger friends were jealous of that later. So it wasn’t completely wasted time. And that’s where I translated almost the entire Roman Elegies. Then that was published, and then came the Venetian Stanzas. And then I also translated a selection of Brodsky’s free verse. When he later lived in America, he encountered a completely different poetic culture — free verse — and that really inspired him. He didn’t write a lot of them, maybe around twenty. So I translated those too. Those three works, in total."
"Many people may not have taken it that way, but for me the communist regime here was primarily lies. People were lied to all the time. I knew what it was like in the West, I had relatives there, I was allowed to correspond with them, I even once... because the son of a Venezuelan aunt was studying with an English aunt and he rode his motorcycle across Europe and came to us... and took me with him to Vienna. That was sometime in the '80s. That was my first time in the West, and I was also staring when I saw a butcher shop full of meat. So we had no illusions at all, but until you see it, Russia, really, you don't know. That's just a theory. Well, of course, in 1968 I was immediately fired from the Academy of Sciences because I refused to admit that it was fraternal aid. I told them that, on the contrary, I thought it was terribly damaging to Russian-Czech relations, so I couldn't accept it at all. So they fired me immediately. And a lot of people were kicked out like that back then—real experts. That’s also why everything started going downhill. Because in their place came vetted, absolute idiots. A lot of very intelligent and highly competent people were simply pushed aside."
"A lot of people still think that communism was a very nice idea, but that it fell into the wrong hands. Oh, my God, something so utterly contrary to human nature... So it always turned out badly, because of course people didn't do it by nature. Who would decide how much I need, etcetera. So they had to resort to terror, violence. It always worked out that way. A lot of Russians still don't understand that. Neither do the Czechs, by the way. Well, that's the really hard thing. It just wasn't talked about. Of course, all of us Czechs knew, or a lot of people knew, that it was a complete lie. And so we got used to it, that's the way it is, well." - "I guess it wasn't exactly easy to listen to it when you know how it is." - "It caused total dislike. I deeply despised our government. Deeply, because if they believed it, well, they were complete morons in my eyes. But mostly they didn't believe it. It was a kind of a joke: 'We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.' It was a kind of an agreement between the Czech people and the totally pro-Soviet government that, like, we're going to do nothing, and they're going to be like... You weren't allowed to jump up and down, although in those eighties it didn't matter. By then it was absolutely clear to everybody that it was absolutely impossible, that regime. And only the careerists, of which there were many, of course, really stuck to it."
Mgr. Maita Arnautová was born on February 21, 1939 in Prague as the eldest of four children of Leonid and Galina Arnaut of Russian origin. Her father, Leonid Arnautov, born in 1908 in Mariupol into the family of an Orthodox priest, came to Czechoslovakia legally in 1925, graduated from the Russian boarding school in Moravská Třebová and then studied statics at the Technical University in Brno. Her mother Galina, née Aše, was born in 1915 in St. Petersburg, spent her childhood in Finland (from 1917) and from 1923 lived with her mother and sisters in Czechoslovakia, in Pilsen and then in Moravská Třebová, where all three sisters studied at the Russian grammar school. Her father, Leonid Arnautov, experienced persecution by the Gestapo during the war and arrest by the Soviet counter-intelligence agency SMERSH after the war. Thanks to the so-called Ratiboř miracle, he managed to avoid deportation to the Soviet Union. The family lived very modestly after 1948. Although the father was a successful and valued structural engineer, from the early 1960s until his death he worked at the State Institute for the Reconstruction of Monumental Towns and Buildings (SÚRPMO) and participated in the reconstruction of the Charles Bridge, he supported his family with four children on limited resources. Maita Arnautová grew up in an environment where Russian culture was cultivated, but the Soviet Union was perceived with utter rejection. She studied at a high school with extended Russian language instruction in Nusle, known as Hanusovka, and in 1956-1961 she graduated in Russian and German studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. After her studies she joined the Slavic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, where she specialised in Russian literature of the so-called Silver Age. She disagreed with the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops and in 1971 she was dismissed from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (CSAS) as part of the normalisation purges. Her husband Ludvík Fojtík, an assistant at the Czech Technical University (CTU), also lost his job. Both were monitored by the State Security Service (StB). Her husband for distributing illegal anti-communist printed materials, she for her contacts with Russian emigrants, relatives abroad and dissident friends. After her dismissal from the Academy of Sciences, she was at the origin of a toy-making cooperative founded by similarly affected friends and colleagues from intellectual circles. After its liquidation in 1975, she worked at the Water Management Institute as a documentary filmmaker and in her spare time worked on translations of poems by the Russian exiled poet Josef Brodský. After 1989 she got a job at the Lidové noviny publishing house as an editor of translations from English, German and French. Her husband Ludvík Fojtík (whom she later divorced) published under the pseudonym Rudolf Starý and devoted himself to philosophy, astrology and Jungian psychology. She considered Czechoslovakia her homeland from childhood, and although she loved the Russian language and culture, she rejected the Soviet totalitarian regime throughout her life. In 2025 she was living in Prague.
