Education
He attended secondary school (gymnasium) in Hradec Králové and later started to study Czechoslovakian, history and French at university in Prague but didn"t finish.
He attended secondary school (gymnasium) in Hradec Králové and later started to study Czechoslovakian, history and French at university in Prague but didn"t finish.
He also used the pseudonym Arnošt Bellis. Starting in 1908, he was a contributor to the Brno newspaper Lidové noviny. This optimistic tale, somewhere between a children"s fairy tale and adult satire, was used as the basis for Leoš Janáček"s opera The Cunning Little Vixen (Příhody Lišky Bystroušky, 1923).
Some of Těsnohlídek"s other work reflects more pessimism and alienation than the lighthearted Vixen"s tale.
In his teens, he watched helplessly as a friend drowned. Two months after their wedding, on a holiday in Norway, she shot herself in the heart in front of him, possibly accidentally.
Těsnohlídek was accused of murdering her, and had to endure two trials before being acquitted. In 1907 he moved to Brno, where he became a reporter of soudničky (cases from the local magistrate"s court) for Lidové noviny.
He became interested in exploring the Moravian underground caves, wrote extensively about them, and submitted his drafts for publication but found they had been heavily edited without his knowledge.
Vixen Sharp Ears was first published in English in 1985, as The Cunning Little Vixen, with pictures by Maurice Sendak. Shortly before Christmas 1919, Těsnohlídek and some friends were walking in the woods outside the town of Bílovice nad Svitavou a few kilometres to the north of Brno when they discovered an abandoned and in danger of freezing girl aged seventeen months. They rescued the child and took her to the police station at Bílovice.
The child, subsequently named Liduška, was adopted by a family named Polákov from Brno, and lived until 1997, dying in Prague.