Lesser Town Square and Nerudova Street

Lesser Town Square was the center of the separate town of Lesser Town: trade took place here, and councilors met here in the town hall. The main ascent to Prague Castle began from the upper part of the square. A shopkeeper on this road was assured of customers, but living quarters and trade often fit behind a single door.

In eighteen thirty-eight, the former artilleryman Antonín Neruda received permission from imperial officials to trade in tobacco and settled his family in the house “At the Two Suns.” At that time, present-day Nerudova Street was called Ostruhova Street. The house stands farther up the slope, at number forty-seven; its old sign—two golden suns—has survived on the façade.

Antonín set up a shop in the front part of the only ground-floor room. Smoking and snuff tobacco were sold behind the counter, and the family lived behind it. His wife Barbora also worked as a servant. Their son Jan was four years old when he came here. Customers entered the Nerudas’ room directly, neighbors discussed one another at the counter, and the boy saw Lesser Town from the side that palace façades do not show.

When Antonín died in eighteen fifty-seven, the business could have been lost along with the permit issued to him. Barbora immediately petitioned to keep the tobacco shop in her name. Her request was granted. Mother and son moved almost directly across the street, to the house “At the Three Red Eagles,” and continued to live on the same street.

Jan Neruda became a journalist and writer. In Tales of the Little Quarter, he brought familiar courtyards, shops, and relations among neighbors onto the page. This is fiction: its characters cannot be taken, without qualification, as portraits of specific residents. Yet the close confines of a world where a person’s reputation is discussed by the whole neighborhood came from the experience of a boy who grew up behind a tobacco counter.

Neruda died in eighteen ninety-one. Four years later, Ostruhova Street was officially renamed Nerudova Street, and a commemorative plaque was installed on the house “At the Two Suns.” The two façades stand almost directly opposite each other: in one, the father traded and raised his son; to the other, the mother moved the shop after her husband’s death. Almost the writer’s entire Lesser Town life passed between them—the writer whose surname the road leading uphill from the square now bears.