Author Jaroslav Kalfar was born in 1988 in Prague, Bohemia, Czech Republic Author Jaroslav Kalfar was born in 1988 in Prague, Bohemia, Czech Republic – one year prior to the Velvet Revolution. He ultimately immigrated to the United States in 2003, where he settled and began a career as an author, winning the 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship because of his promise.
One book that came out of the work enabled by the fellowship is Spaceman of Bohemia, which tells the story of an astronaut named Jakub Procházka, who volunteers to travel to a dust cloud near the planet Venus. Jakub agrees to go on the mission because he is dissatisfied with his life on Earth, despite having a loving and doting wife, and because of his desire to escape his past trauma. On his trip, Jakub meets a giant spider called Hanuš, who quickly becomes his friend as Jakub becomes more and more isolated from humanity. But Jakub faces a number of struggles that threaten his life, mental health, and perhaps more importantly, his safety.
The novel is an exploration of a number of complex themes. Primarily, though, it is an exploration of how human beings have a tendency to escape and how they use their coping mechanisms to deal with trauma.
Spaceman of Bohemia is dedicated to Kalfar's grandfather, whom he adored. And the main character Jakub's grandfather was based on Kalfar's own grandfather. In writing the novel, which initially began as a short story, Kalfar drew upon his own life experiences and the life experiences of his family. And the experience that spoke to Kalfar the most was his cultural identity as a Czech man. In fact, Kalfar initially wrote Jakub to be American, but he eventually changed him to be Czech because he felt it added "depth" to the story and allowed Kalfar to infuse some of his own personal histories into the novel.
Ultimately, Kalfar wrote Spaceman of Bohemia because of his fascination "with loneliness, its contradictions, how people experience it so differently. It seemed like there was no greater place to study loneliness than within the confines of space."
