The Dream and the Reality, Tom 4

The Dream and the Reality, Tom 4 - Jiri Hanzelka

Jiří Hanzelka (24 December 1920 – 15 February 2003) and Miroslav Zikmund (born 14 February 1919), known collectively as Hanzelka and Zikmund, were a duo of Czech adventurers known for their travels in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania in the 1940s and 1950s, and for the books, articles, and films they created about their journeys. In 1947, Hanzelka and Zikmund explained the "5" project to the automotive company Tatra. The company, impressed by the plan and seizing the opportunity to promote its vehicles, decided to sponsor the trip, and gave them a silver Tatra 87. After three months of gaining experience with the car at the Tatra factory in Kopřivnice, the duo set out on their first trip. It was a continuous three-and-a-half-year voyage through Africa and Latin America, from April 1947 to November 1950 and covering 44 countries and 111,000 kilometers. Having traveled from the north coast of Africa to Mexico, the duo returned home, but their country had greatly changed during their absence. The 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état, scored by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia with the support of the Soviet Union, had put a Stalinist government in control, beginning one of the bleakest eras of the country's history. Initially, the government treated Hanzelka and Zikmund well; though most Czechs were barred from going abroad, the duo were allowed to publish the fruits of their travels because their descriptions were not seen as politically threatening. They were able to launch a second trip, running five and a half years continuously from 1959 to 1964, taking them to Eastern Europe, Asia, and various Pacific islands with two prototypes of the Tatra 805 truck. On this trip, the duo reported on Indonesia, Irian Jaya, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Throughout their travels, both captured still photographs and films as well as writing articles. In addition, they wrote a weekly radio program about their travels for Czechoslovak Radio, which became one of the most popular on the station; since they lacked the means to broadcast from the locations, they simply wrote the scripts and sent them back to Czechoslovakia, where their voices were recreated by two actors. Their works of travel literature include eleven full-length books full of photographs and descriptions of the economic and socio-political situations of the places they visited, four picture books, three children's books, and 150 short travel documentary films. Their books were also serialized in the newspaper Mladá fronta. In Czechoslovakia, where the tight control of the Communist government made it impossible for most Czechs to travel out of the country, the works of Hanzelka and Zikmund offered a rare chance for vicarious escape into exotic climes. They became the best-selling writers of twentieth-century Eastern Europe; their books sold 6,525,000 copies in the Soviet Bloc and were translated into eleven languages. They became a national institution in the Czech lands, and were equally popular in Soviet Russia, where the premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded of his aides that the three volumes of Hanzelka and Zikmund's Africa: Dreams and Reality be on his bedside table no matter where he went. Hanzelka and Zikmund visited 83 countries in total.