The genre of the novel developed relatively late in Czech literature. Paradoxically, some Czech novelists reached considerable international recognition in the 1970s and 1980s, while their work was banned by the communist regime in their own country.
The normal development of Czech literature was practically halted for almost two centuries after 1620. The ongoing political and religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants was resolved in favour of the Catholics and the Hapsburg dynasty, when the Czech Protestant side was defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain near Prague on 8th November, 1620, in the early stages of Europe's Thirty Years' War. Bohemia was forcibly catholicised, seriously ravaged by war and subjected to economic exploitation. As a result, the Czech language lost its official status and with a few exceptions it ceased being used as a mainstream medium of intellectual and creative discourse for almost two centuries.
Under the influence of Romanticism as well as political and economic reforms at the end of the eighteenth century, the Czech National Revival developed at the beginning of the ninteenth century. However, the Czech national activists mostly had to work in a climate of political oppression and absolutist rule, in particular between 1815 - 1848 and then again between 1849 -1867.
While authors had created a new Czech literary tradition by 1848, in this early period of modern Czech literature, the most important genre was poetry. Later, the Czechs also cultivated the genre of the short story.
The first serious modern Czech fiction writer is Božena Němcová (1820-1862). sShe produced two types of prose: the so-called "images of national life", non-narrative, almost folkloristic descriptions of the rural Czech cultural environment, which the National Revival activists believed formed the essence of the Czech nation, and socially critical fiction, in which sharply realistic descriptions of contemporary times usually culminate in a happy end, as a result of Němcová's social utopianism. Němcová was the first Czech feminist writer. She was partially influenced by the French author George Sand.
Němcová's greatest achievement is Babička (1855, The Grandmother), which a Czech critic described as a "classical idyll, rather than a novel". In the work, Němcová created an archetypical character of a Czech grandmother, the embodiment of all the national cultural virtues. Using memories from her own childhood and the device of the passage of the seasons in the countryside, the author managed firmly to integrate the character of the grandmother - the ideal of goodness, wisdom and morality - into her rural environment, in which she took care of her grandchildren. Babička stands half-way between the genre of a non-narrative, semi-folkloristic prose and a novel. A narrative strand emerges in the second half of the work.
Karolina Světlá (1830-1899), another early Czech feminist, was capable of creating psychologically convincing characters, and knew how to produce a gripping plot. She used her narratives to shed light on certain philosophical and moral issues. In the 1860s and 1870s, she wrote five novels, set in a rural environment of Northern Bohemia, in which she paid homage to the moral courage and selflessness of strong women. For instance, in Vesnický román (1867, A Village Novel,) Světlá asked whether it was proper for a person to pursue freedom and hapiness at the expense of other individuals. Also in Vesnický román, Světlá highlighted the modern notion of plurality and relativity of views and beliefs, which she contrasted with an earlier, monolithic attitude. Later novels by Světlá from the 1870s have libertarian, anti-Catholic and nationalist overtones. They are implicitly connected with the political struggles of the day.
Liberal journalist Jakub Arbes (1840-1914) was persecuted in the 1870s for his outspoken, humanitarian and left-wing attitudes. Under the influence of Emile Zola's theory of the experimental novel, Arbes wrote fiction in which he analysed the plight of the Czech urban working classes and explained the ideas of utopian socialism. These novels lack a tight structure.
Arbes's work is characterised by a sense of moral justice and rationalist, critical thinking. His most important works are his "romanettoes", written in the 1860s and the 1870s. These short novels are predecessors of the modern detective story. They are firmly set within concrete locations, mostly in Prague, and they usually present a gothic mystery, which is subsequently resolved through intellectual effort and rational analysis. Arbes's "romanettoes" introduced technical knowledge and scientific reasoning into Czech literature. Arbes used autobiographical elements and anarchic and free-thinking themes in his novels. He was fascinated by creative individuals and political rebels whose intellectual capacities gave them personal independence, but whose non-conformism led them to destruction. Svatý Xaverius (1873, St.Xaver) points forward to the twentieth century by emphasising the frustrating incompleteness and inconclusiveness of human stories.
Distantly related to the "detective" novels of Jakub Arbes through "gothic" themes was the fiction of the "anachronistic Romantic" Julius Zeyer (1841-1901). Zeyer's neo-Romanticism was the expression of dissatisfaction with the banality and utilitarianism of life in Bohemia in the last decades of the 19th century. Traces of decadence in his work foreshadowed fin-de-siecle attitudes. Zeyer sumberged himself in Russian heroic folk poetry, in the era of chivalry in France, in the atmosphere of Gothic Christianity from the 14th and 15th centuries, in the distant cultural traditions of India, Japan, China and in Czech history. Apart from poetry and drama, he wrote fiction in which he paid homage to basic human values, love, selflessness and friendship. For instance, Román o věrném přátelství Amise a Amila (1880,The Romance of the Faithful Friendship of Amis and Amil,), is a mediaeval narrative, set in France. It is one of Zeyer's "restored paintings". These are stories taken from old literature and retold in a modern way, in a highly embellished fashion, with great emphasis on style and psychological analysis.
Zeyer's most mature works are two novels with autobiographical undertones. They both deal with themes of an individual' s debt towards one's nation. Jan Maria Plojhar (1891), set mostly in Italy, expresses the erotic and political frustrations of a middle class dreamer, searching in vain for the Absolute and yearning for action. The decadent Slovak hero of Dům u tonoucí hvězdy (1895, The House of the Drowning Star) also feels personally responsible for the predicament of his subjugated nation, but like Plojhar, he perishes abroad in resignation.
The arival of nationalist neo-Romanticism in the last decades of the 19th century was the result of the inability of the Czechs to gain full political and national freedoms from the Austrian government. Their frustration made an impact on a number of writers of historical novels.
The main interpreter of Czech past was the prolific novelist Alois Jirásek (1851-1930), who aimed his novels at the sentimentally-patriotic middle classes. Paradoxically, Jirásek's work was widely used for propaganda purposes by the Czechoslovak communists in the 1950s. At that time, Jirásek's somewhat tendentious, idealised image of the Czech past was presented in a large number of novels, written to encourage the Czech national pride.
A skilled narrator, Jirásek was primarily a populariser of the Hussite Revolution, using the angle of vision of the 19th century Czech historian František Palacký. Jirásek painted images from Czech history on a broad canvas. Jirásek strove to emulate Tolstoy in order to produce novels which would be historically authentic, yet creatively convincing.
Jirásek wrote three trilogies from the Hussite times: Mezi proudy (1887-1890, Between the Currents), Proti všem (1893, Against Everyone) and Bratrstvo (1899-1908, The Brethren). Temno (1913 - 1915, Darkess) is a vast tableau of the post 1620 counter-reformation period, the backbone of which is a love story of a protestant girl and a Catholic boy. Jirásek's five-volume novel F.L.Věk (1888-1906) traces the early history of the Czech National Revival, telling the story of a patriotic merchant in a small Czech town. Unlike the collective-minded Jirásek, Zikmund Winter (1846-1912) concentrated on individual characters in Mistr Kampanus (1909, Master Kampanus), which deals with life at Prague University in the cataclysmic year 1620. The work is a gripping study of an individual's predicament, exposed to authoritarian pressure.
Josef Holeček (1853 - 1929), Jan Herben (1857-1936), Karel Václav Rais (1859 - 1926) Teréza Nováková (1853-1912) and Karel Klostermann (1848 - 1923) wrote realistic novels set in various rural regions of Bohemia. Holeček produced a twelve volume chronicle Naši (1898 - 1930, Our People) in which he traced the rise of the Czech peasant class using the example of developments within a South Bohemian village during several decades in the middle of the 19th century. Peasantry formed the backbone of the modern Czech nation and Holeček's magnum opus was an act of homage to the nation's resurrection. The heroes of Nováková's novels were country visionaries who strove - mostly unsuccessfully - for the realisation of their religious and political ideals. Rais's short stories often highlighted conflicts between the younger and the older members of rural families and the oppression of the old people due to the greed of the young. Rais wrote three idyllic novels from the countryside, in other novels (especially in Kalibův zločin, 1892, Kaliba's Crime, which has an urban setting) he moves from realism to incipient naturalism.
Towards the end of the 19th century, young Czech writers and poets expressed their rejection of the increasingly sterile Czech nationalism in their Manifesto of the Czech Modern Movement (1895). They demanded full freedom of speech, the right to criticise, the right to assert one's individuality and authentic expressions of inner feelings in literature. The impact of the document was strong: Czech literature freed itself for several decades from its task to serve the nation.
Impressionistic works were written by poet Fráňa Šrámek (1877-1952). The hero of the novel Stříbrný vítr (1910, The Silver Wind) is an enthusiastic and idealistic young student, who reaches maturity amidst small-town brutality, narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. Šrámek's sensual novel Tělo (1919, The Body), is a homage to the "eternal femininity" and an anti-war protest. Traces of impressionism and naturalism are to be found in the trilogy by Vilém Mrštík (1863-1912), which was partially inspired by the author's own experiences. The first novel, Pohádka máje (1892, A May Fairy Tale) is a idyllic love story, set in a sunny countryside. Mrštík's second novel Santa Lucia (1893) is a tragic tale of a student, trying to survive in an indifferent, alien big city.
Karel Matěj Čapek-Chod (1860-1927), is the most important representative of Czech naturalism, with elements of expressionism and even Modernism. Čapek-Chod's novels are highly readable, skilfully constructed accounts of life in pre and post-First World War Bohemia. The author had detailed knowledge of a wide variety of social environments as well as a strong narrative talent and was able to produce vivid, often sarcastic evocations of Prague life which formed a background to his energetically recounted narratives. Turbina (1916, The Turbine), Čapek-Chod's perhaps most successful work, is a compassionate and amusing chronicle of gradual disintegration of an upper-middle class Prague family and the failures of its two daughters.
The independent, democratic Czechoslovak Republic was founded in 1918 as a result of the disintegration of the Austrian Empire. During the First World War, Czech deserters nad POWs from the Austrian army formed a Czechoslovak legion in Russia. The spectacular miliary achievements of the legion brought the Czech cause to the attention of world leaders, especially the American president Wilson, making it easier for Czech representatives to persuade international politicians to allow the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War. Authors like Rudolf Medek and Josef Kopta wrote novels celebrating the achievements of the Czech legion.
A totally different interpretation of the war was presented by Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923) in the picaresque novel Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války (1921-1923, The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War.) In Švejk, Hašek analysed the predicament of individuals, caught up in the war, which he saw as a giant, inhuman attack on the world and its civilisation. Švejk negates the destructive reality around him by drowning it in incessant talking. The novel became popular among ordinary people, although official criticism rejected the work as "immoral" and "vulgar" and tried to exclude it from Czech culture. Yet Švejk entered world literature through the medium of German. It is now the most translated work of Czech literature into foreign languages.
Another writer from Bohemia, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) belonged to the tradition of Prague literature written in German by the local German and Jewish minority. Like Hašek, Kafka preoccupied himself with the predicament of an individual, facing impersonal, absolute bureaucratic power, anticipating in his novels Der Process (1915, The Trial) and Das Schloss (1922, The Castle) the nightmarish experience of millions of people with twentieth-century Nazi and communist totalitarianism. While Kafka is not regarded as part of Czech literature, his writings made a considerable impact on Czech authors from the 1960s onwards who bore witness to life under communism in their work.
After the First World War, some Czech novelists used expressionistic techniques to convey the feeling of crisis in European civilisation, the disintegration of all values and Man's alienation. Richard Weiner (1884-1937) is perhaps the most important representative of Czech expressionism: he wrote complex stories, highlighting the incomprehensible mystery of human existence. Later, Weiner came close to surrealism. Jan Weiss (1892-1972), one of the founders of Czech science fiction, also produced expressionistic prose with surrealist overtones. For instance, Dům o 1000 patrech (1929, The 1000-storey building) is a fantastic narrative set in a nightmarish skyscraper which symbolises the structure of society and its subsequent collapse.
Ladislav Klíma (1878-1928) was an eccentric, anarchic, self-styled author and philosopher. His philosophical texts were inspired by Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Klíma's prose is regarded by contemporary Czech critics as an important contribution to the creation of modern European fiction. Klíma dwelled on the borderline between consciousness and the subconsious: he gave free rein to his fantastic imagination. He extolled intellectual activity. The independent will was for him the only, absolute reality. He negated the outside world with absurd, horrifying visions of life. Klíma wrote a large amount of fiction, most of it before the First World War. The most extensive was Velký román I.-III. (1991-1992, The Great Novel, I.-III.) of which several thousand pages were completed, but only fragments have survived. Utrpení knížete Sternenhocha (1928, The Suffering of Prince Sternenhoch) depicts the world as a repulsive prison, full of sadomasochistic, animalist people. The narrative in Klíma's texts is punctuated with philosophical reflections on death, immortality and eternity.
Jaroslav Durych (1886-1962), a leading member of a Catholic group of writers, admired the Baroque period after the defeat of Czech Protestants in 1620. He wrote a trilogy set during the Thirty Years' War, entitled Bloudění (1929, Wandering). Durych's extreme religious feelings, his mysticism and his symbolism were also influenced by expressionism.
The Czechs usually regard Karel Čapek (1890-1938) as the most important author of the period between the two world wars. Čapek was politically close to the Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. He held tolerant, centrist and relativist views, influenced by American pragmatism. Čapek worked as a journalist, but his literary output was large, covering a number of genres. Apart from being a novelist, he was an important playwright and an accomplished essayist. Čapek often used science fiction themes as a point of departure to enable him to analyse topical moral and philosophical problems. The structure and style of his novels were influenced by his journalistic work.
Továrna na Absolutno (1922, The Absolute at Large) has a loose form of a series of newspaper articles, using fictitious documentary material. The novel is a caustic comment on religious intolerance and a satire on Czech politics. The slightly opaque Krakatit (1924), foreshadows the invention of the nuclear bomb. The invention is stolen from its inventor, who tries to recover it in a nightmarish journey. Čapek argues that rather than to strive for heroic dees, it is much more important to small, day to day work, which is of benefit to ordinary people.
Válka s mloky, (1936, A War with the Newts) is also closely associated with journalistic techniques and topical problems.The work is a well-informed satire on the immoral and selfish practice of international diplomacy and big business, as well as a warning against the danger of totalitarianism. Although reacting to contemporary issues of Čapek's day, the novel is still surprisingly relevant. To a larger extent than Továrna na Absolutno, Válka s mloky uses "documentary" material, including ficticious period newspaper articles, political declarations, scholarly treatises and news agency reports.
Čapek's "noetical trilogy" (Hordubal, 1933, Povětroň, [1934, The Glider], Obyčejný život, [1934, Ordinary Life]) poses the question "what is truth". Čapek compares and contrasts different views of the same facts. During the investigation of a murder in Hordubal, authentic truth seems lost in official reports. In Povětroň, three different witnesses speculate about the identity and the life story of an unconscious pilot after an accident. There is a certain amount of common ground in their interpretations. In Obyčejný život, an ordinary clerk discovers in himself a number of unrealised potentialities when writing his life story. Unrealised potentialities in our lives make it possible for us to understand one another. Čapek argues that authentic knowledge can only be gleaned if we take into consideration a number of different, individual views and interpretations.
Čapek's unfinished novel, Život a dílo skladatele Foltýna (1939, The Life and Work of Composer Foltýn), again contrasts different views of reality, this time to create a portrait of a fraudulent composer. The work argues that to be a creative artist means being aware of serious moral responsibility.
The Jewish writer Karel Poláček (1892-c.1944-45), also a journalist, was an accomplished student of ordinary people and of the everyday. Poláček's tetralogy Okresní město (1936,A Provincial Town), Hrdinové táhnou do boje (1936,Heroes go off to fight), Podzemní město (1937,The Underground City), Vyprodáno (1939, Sold Out). is a study of stagnant, parochial, narrow-minded and immoral life of the inhabitants of a small Czech town at the time before the First World War and then during the War at the front, which causes all the negative characteristics of the protagonists to blossom. In the end, only those who discard moral scruples, manipulating and dominating other people, survive. The cycle ends as a powerful anti-war statement.
But apart from being a ruthless exposer of the fallacies of the narrow-minded, the bigotted and the immoral, Poláček could show affectionate understanding. While waiting as a Jew for deportation to a Nazi concentration camp where he perished, he wrote an entertaining and penetrating account of life in the town of his childhood, as seen through the eyes of small boys, Bylo nás pět, (1946, There were Five of Us ). The work parodies the stilted style of primary school essays.
Vladislav Vančura (1891 - 1942) experimented widely with language, style and form of the Czech novel, using biblical influences, the mediaeval literary tradition, renaissance fiction and the 18th century European novel. He created his own idiosyncratic style of poetic fiction, in which the narrator plays a salient role. Vančura's novellistic experiments were an important point of departure for the work of Milan Kundera in the 1960s and later.
Pole orná a válečná (1925, Ploughed Field and Battlefield) is a lyrical, fragmentary and sarcastic account of the destruction of the traditional 19th century world by the apocalyptic brutality of the First World War. The playful short novel Rozmarné léto (1926, Capricious Summer) was influenced by the Czech artistic avant-garde from the 1920s. Three middle-aged men are unsuccessfully trying to win the favours of a beautiful young woman, the epitome of poetry. A large part of this popular work is taken up by the relaxed, friendly conversation of the three companions, anticipating Kundera. Rozmarné léto is an expression of Vančura's belief in the Rabelaisian enjoyment of life. A similar philosophy can be found in the linguistically experimental novel Hrdelní pře anebo Přísloví (1930, Trial for Murder or Proverbs) in which several protagonists unsuccessfully try to solve a mysterious death and then devote themselves to the enjoyment of life. Poslední soud (1929, The Last Judgment) is a highly lyrical, heavily metaphorical work which confronts the life of backward Ruthenians from the easternmost part of pre-war Czechoslovakia with the way of life of contemporary Prague, thus contrasting the natural world with modern civilisation.
Markéta Lazarová (1931), a lyrical novel, set in mediaeval times, deals with the relationships of two hostile families of highway robbers and a strong erotic bond which forms between a woman from one of the families and a man from the other. The novel as a celebratory evocation of the "strong passions" of the Middle Ages. It speaks of love, death, treason, courage and cowardice. It is a polemic with the over-refinement of contemporary literature. As a film-maker, Vančura experimented with the verbal evocation of filmatic techniques in this work, in particular with vivid close-ups.
Vančura's last, perhaps most mature novel Rodina Horvathova (1938), The Horvath Family) was the first part of an unfinished trilogy, which was to analyse social changes in Czech society from the turn of the century until the present. Vančura returned here to the theme of the desintegration of the patriarchal "good old days".
Ivan Olbracht (1882 -1952) contributed to the development of Czech psychological novel with Freudian overtones and gave new life to the genre of the mythological legend. Žalář nejtemnější (1916, The Darkest Dungeon) delves into the mind of a pathologically jealous blind man. Podivné přátelství herce Jesenia (1919, The Strange Friendship of Actor Jesenius), a war novel, develops the doppleganger theme, dealing with the friendship of two male actors who are diametrically opposed in their psychological characteristics. In Nikola Šuhaj Loupežník (1933, Nikola Šuhaj, Highwayman), Olbracht used documentary material from a real-life Robin Hood story from Ruthenia, the easternmost, backward and rural part of what was then Czechoslovakia to create a sophisticated contemporary ballad, a modern myth with folkore elements.
Between 1918 and 1939, Czech authors experimented with the genre of the novel in many forms. Narratives were used to make general, often symbolic statements. In the 1920s, new forms of the novel were created which frequently used journalistic and documentary techniques and analysed mass social movements. Utopian and fantastic fiction was written as a vehicle to gain understanding of contemporary social issues.
In the 1930s, Czech fiction reached a considerable degree of maturity. Czech writers worked in the atmosphere of creative freedom and were in direct contact with international literary developments. They were fully aware of multiplicity of human experience and of the existence of complex and multilayered reality which they attempted to depict truthfully, without reference to artificial ideological schemes. During the second world war, many Czech writers returned to the task of bolstering Czech national consciousness. The demand for Czech novels was considerable under the German occupation. After the communist takeover of 1948, non-communist Czech authors were banned (some of them ending in prison) and the propagandistic technique of "socialist realism" (as defined by the Russian "theoretician" A. A. Zhdanov) was imposed on Czech literature.
Before the curtain came down in 1948, some authors used their traumatic experiences from the period of Nazi occupation to produce kafkaesque work close to existentialism. Thus Jiří Weil (1900-1959), a Jew who spent the war in hiding in Czechoslovakia, wrote Život s hvězdou (1949, Living with a Yellow Star), about the everyday functioning of Nazi totalitarianism. The post-1948 emigré, former diplomat Egon Hostovský (1908-1973) used his experiences as a refugee to produce several novels bearing witness to the predicament of victims of political upheavals, lost within an indifferent, hostile and alienated world. The most significant of these is Všeobecné spiknutí (first published in English in 1961 as The Plot ).
Václav Řezáč (1901-1956), who had written accomplished psychological novels during the war, embraced the new doctrine of "socialist realism" after 1948 and published two highly clichéd "novels of socialist construction" Nástup (1951, The Line-up) and Bitva (1954, The Battle), fictionalising political propaganda. Other pro-regime authors attempted the same. Although of inferior quality, these novels were widely read in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s.
The publication of Zbabělci (1958, banned, republished in 1964,The Cowards) by Josef Škvorecký (b. 1924) heralded the gradual return of more normal conditions. Zbabělci, is a subjective, casual, ironic and anti-heroic account of the end of the Second World War, as seen through the eyes of a teenager. Stylistically, the work is influenced by Hemingway and by jazz music. The novel became a watershed. It performed a liberating demystifying role, helping to destroy the monopoly of the official communist world view in Czech literature.
From the early 1960s onwards, Czech authors worked very hard to subvert the official communist ideology by writing more anti-heroic and anti-ideological novels. These empasised the authenticity, plurality and unpredictability of individual human experience, even under conditions of totalitarian oppression. The mid-1960s saw the publication of several such "novels of disillusionment". Czech novelists took up again the interrupted tradition of polyphonic and polysemantic novel from the interwar period. In the 1960s, Czech writers, along with other intellectuals, managed succssfully to dilute the communist system. Their efforts culminated in the short-lived Prague Spring of 1968, when people in Czechoslovakia enjoyed full freedom of speech in the media for six months.
Sekyra (1966, The Axe) by Ludvík Vaculík (b.1926) has a highly experiemental structure. The novel displays a wide range of closely intertwined stylistic and linguistic registers. The category of time is abolished. All events are simultaneously re-assessed in the narrator's mind, at a time when the meaning and purpose of the whole of his life is seriously questioned.
Žert (1967, The Joke) by Milan Kundera (b. 1929) is another complex, pluralist and polysemantic novel. On one level, it is perhaps the most significant subversively anti-ideological account of life in communist Czechoslovakia from the 1950s onwards, on another, it is a bitter protest against the unintelligibility of life, which is seen as a cruel joke, played by an unknown Creator on human beings.
Vladimír Páral (b.1932) examined some of the typical features of modern, consumerist Western society, as they manifested themselves in communist CzechoslovakiaĘin his novels such as Veletrh splněných přání (1964, The Trade Fair of Fulfilled Wishes).
After the Soviet invasion of 1968, Czechoslovakia was thrown back into a rigid totalitarian mould which lasted until the fall of communism in 1989. Some 400 Czech authors who refused to cooperate with the communist authorities were banned. Many of them published their work in "samizdat", typewritten, clandestinely circulated copies, others left the country.
Paradoxically, it was in this period that the Czech novel achieved international recognition, primarily through the work of writers such as Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký and Bohumil Hrabal.
Milan Kundera, who has been living in France since 1975, has used his Central European experience to produce his own, personal concept of a "novel as a debate", contrasting the shortcomings of life under communism with shortcomings of life in a Western consumerist society. Kundera's novels are variations on abstract concepts. Perhaps the most well-known is Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (first published in Czech in 1985, definitive French edition 1987, The Unbearable Lightness of Being).
Josef Škvorecký, who emigrated to Canada in the early 1970s, used the form of the novel to bear witness to the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. Škvorecký is a master teller of anecdotic, bitter-sweet tales, with absurd undertones, which he interweaves to produce a complex picture of twentieth-century life. Mirákl (1972, Miracle in Bohemia) paints a wide canvas of life in Czechoslovakia in the first two decades of communism, Příběh inženýra lidských duší (1977, 1978, The Engineer of Human Souls), contrasts the traumatic experiences from Central Europe to often superficial life on the American continent. The Engineer of Human Souls is an exercise in misunderstanding between two cultures. Both novels have the structure of a tapestry where a number of narrative strands develop simultaneously to produce a complex picture.
Ludvík Vaculík's Český snář (1983, The Czech Dreambook), a "diary", written in Prague by a member of the dissident community, harassed by the police, is a structure precariously balanced on the borderline between fact and fiction. There is tension between the documentary and fictional elements of the work. After 1968 Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997), perfected his spontaneous style of "automatic writing", synthesising a number of twentieth-century influences, including psychoanalysis, surrealism, slapstick comedy, abstract expressionism and pub talk in the novels Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (written 1971, published 1980, I served the King of England) , Příliš hlučná samota (written 1976, published in 1980, Too Noisy Solitude), Městečko, kde se zastavil čas (written 1973, published 1978,The Little Town where Time Stood Still) and his three-volume autobiography Svatby v domě, (published 1987, Weddings in the House,) Vita nuova (published 1987) and Proluky (published 1986,Vacant Sites).
Towards the end of the 1980s, post-modernism made an impact on Czech fiction. By this time, authors were writing under the influence of the harsh, pathological reality of a decomposing "posttotalitarian" communist system. Apocalyptic and often drastic images of decay, cruelty, loneliness, alcoholic intoxication, drug addiction and sexual promiscuity appear in the work of the younger novelists.
A typical example of this purple form of prose is Sestra (1994, Sister) by Jáchym Topol (b. 1962). This is a long novel consisting of an almost uncontrollable, gushing stream of lyrical passages, influenced by Hrabal's writing technique, but much more drastically explicit. Sestra deals with the adventurous life of a group of young outsiders and their transition into the "grab-what-you-can" world after the fall of communism.
Another postmodernist, Jiří Kratochvil (b.1940) created his own idiosyncratic style, based on the local dialect of the Moravian city of Brno. The construction of his novels (Medvědí román [1990, The Bear Novel] Uprostřed nocí zpěv, [1992, Singing in the Night]) negates construction. Gripping narrative is often interrupted in mid stream, it is parodied and debunked. Meaning is deliberately obscured by ambiguity. Concrete facts and locations are juxtaposed to fantastic, grotesque and brutal scenes. Kratochvil's poetics is somewhat reminiscent of J.L. Borges's magical realism. Daniela Hodrová (b. 1946) in her novels (Podobojí [written in 1977-78, published in 1991, In both kinds;]Kukly [written in 1981-1983, published in 1991, Masks]Théta [1992]) also builds complex and fantastic literary structures, full of erudite allusions. Czech literature has always played an important role in Czech national life as an instrument of self-examination, sometimes even substituting politics. In the 1970s and 1980s, the testimony of Czech novelists about the Central European experience reached the international public. Yet the importance of literature for the Czechs has decreased since the fall of communism in 1989. Although many more titles are published in the Czech Republic than ever before, their printruns have fallen dramatically. In the 1990s, the Czech novel has lost its social function as an instrument of protest and national self-expression.
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