Authors

He is a co-founder of Zvuk, a magazine for the culture and society of the Zlín region; he was also instrumental in the birth of the Wlastenci choral society of the International PEN Club (Czech Centre). His awards include the annual Mladá Fronta Prize for his novel/diptych Duely [Duels], a prize in Brno’s 1993 European Feuilleton competition, and the 1994 Křepelek Prize for his creative input into Radio Free Europe’s programme Hlasy a Ohlasy [Voices and Echoes]. In 2004 he was awarded the Magnesia Litera Prize for his novel Zvlčení [Growing Wild] and in 2010 the State Prize for Literature for the novel Na krásné modré Dřevnici. 

The theatre of operations for Bajaja’s magical, highly visual and dramatically agile prose is – with a single exception – rural Moravian Wallachia. His writing is in the wide-ranging tradition of novels/novellas of the countryside, a tradition which has woven a path through Czech literature since the nineteenth century, beginning with Stašek, Preissová, Světlá, Baar and Klostermann and continuing with Čep and Durych and the lyric poetry of Moravia’s Jaromír Tomeček, an author little remembered today whose lyric poetry celebrates the beauties of nature. The rustic nature of Bajaja’s writing is in obvious opposition to the poetry of the banal, although it is the banal – with all its everyday work transactions and social rituals – which is the source of and point of departure for a prose which spreads, forks and meanders over time. Bajaja’s fictions have echoes of the ballad. But they are about more than a mere tendency to archaize or the search for rural colour in fragments of a harmonic and melancholic past. Where the author digs deep in different time scales, he is principally doing so in order to indicate the absence of any kind of fundamental rootedness and reverence for myth in the modern/postmodern world. The uprootness of contemporary man – reflected long before Kafka, Camus and Joyce in the novels of Dostoyevsky, Zola and Flaubert – is in Bajaja’s view a feature of the present to be regretted. In contrast to contemporaries such as Vladimír Páral, Bajaja focuses in his work on the carousel of the everyday, with its demands often emptied of meaning, even nonsensical, enlivened only by the diversions afforded by sex. Bajaja’s stories and the characters of his heroes tend to be based on family ties and the chains of inheritance, on the close relationship between the village-dweller and nature and ways in which this connection has been violated by civilization, with the result that even the most hardened rustic is forced to make irreversible concessions to an urban lifestyle. Bajaja’s Moravian Wallachia is a landscape of wooden mountain cottages, cowherds and shepherds in summer, and in winter meadows, pastures, glades and dark, semi-virgin forests numb with cold. The author succeeds in investing this landscape with qualities of the drama of myth, a stage which connects the burning core of the planet, the human heart, and the most distant stars. As such it is quite natural that the boundary line where the real meets the magical, where fact meets dream should provide Bajaja’s narrative with a locale in which the virtually miraculous can be played out. Such an effect – reminiscent of Fellini or Bergman – as produced in Bajaja’s work is no art for art sake’s or mere decoration: indeed, it is these tones and signals of immortality, generality and myth that move the spiralling plot towards its culmination. And ultimately this spiralling plot shows man – who is dragged down by his duties and his angst – his solitude, a sense of metaphysical giddiness which fleetingly breaks through the mundane, making manifest the reality that our existence has lost its sacred character and we ourselves have lost the ability to experience tragedy and the subsequent catharsis. An irresolution in time and space, the recurring parallels of the saga, digressions into pasts distant and not so distant (for the most part grounded in the twentieth century; time in the country runs more slowly and is more sensitive than time in the city) – all these things are worked into the form of Bajaja’s writing. The mosaic-like composition of the story has fragments of individual episodes of plot, dialogue and monologue (often given in the vernacular); the characters often reflect on matters not of their own choosing, or else their thoughts are governed by the strict laws and customs of the village community, of an ancientness untouched by rust or patina. Paradoxically, these thoughts are often called up at moments of confrontation, conflict and struggle – all major players in Bajaja’s vivid tales. It is as if the greatest sceptic or unbeliever were drawn – thanks to this fanciful, rolling tension between past and present – into situations and relationships which are timeless and of far broader application than he knows. These relations survive regardless of human weakness, man’s desertion of his own fate and his vain attempts to extricate himself from the natural cycle. Bajaja’s first work Mluviti stříbro [Speaking is Silver] epitomizes all of these features. It is set in the wilds of the mountain region through which the Bečva river runs, and tells the story of the young livestock specialist Honza Hába (in part in his own words) and his girl Pavla. The tale of the two lovers provides the novel’s starting point; it expands suddenly and astronomically to encompass the antique, the mythical and the Promethean. Elsewhere in the work we encounter the melancholy of Proudhon’s picture – which bears a distant resemblance to the method of Proust. For Bajaja, however, the process of anamnesis lacks the significance it holds for the author of Remembrance of Things Past. When in the period of Normalization Bajaja penned his first work, pseudo-authors such as South Moravia’s Jan Kozák were favoured by the state. Still, he succeeded from the very beginning in working outside the prevalent ideology, failing to acknowledge the fashions of the time and place, such as the gentle probing of character psychology, or, in the manner of Páral, the picturesque but plodding existences of protagonists and comic characters alike. Even in his earliest works, Bajaja enlists his characters in the attempt to heroize the myths and rituals of country life. In 1988, as the period of totalitarianism drew to its close, Bajaja published Duely [Duels], a wide-ranging epopee of a novel which spanned the lives of several generations of mountain cottagers in Moravian Wallachia. A second edition of this work was published in 2005, and it was seen to have lost nothing of its relevance and vividness. It was with Duels that Bajaja’s skills of editing and visual conjuring – so reminiscent of those of the film-maker – achieved their full power. There is a sense of penetration and permeability, a movement back and forth; the bridge of the present is walked to reach the past and discover windows leading into the future. All this is accentuated by the role played by specifications of time – the hour, the day, the month, the year; these are used in place of the word as headings to passages with a ballad-like quality. Of the dozens of characters in Duels, the protagonist (Lojza) is once again a livestock specialist; as in Speaking is Silver the hero is drawn towards his deus ex machina against a magical, rural backdrop. This man is a modern intellectual, alienated from the elements and laws of nature; yet his contact with the cosmic passage of village time sees him grow into an understanding of his roots. The tavern provides a frame for the memories, a kind of confessional with a connection to the hero’s reflections, his alter ego, his conscience. (We see in this the influence of the treasures of the literary Baroque; Bajaja acknowledges that he is a student of Comenius.) The first part of Duels – The First Duel – reveals the dialogues going on in the hero’s head; in The Second Duel the foreground is taken by “Old Ozéfek Opálka”, the grandfather of Hanka, the hero’s wife. Ozéfek is an icon of the shepherding community, a thinker-eccentric; he is an eyewitness of two world wars which shook the hectic and civilized life of the towns with such force that the echoes of catastrophe were heard by countrydwellers, whom Bajaja transforms into the archetypes of myth. As magical memory and tale-telling rub up against the clamorous present, Duels takes on the character of the stele or the palimpsest: as if agitated by a sudden gust, all the imagery and historicity of the world descend: “ … something moved a claw scratched a branch snapped mouth clenched cuneiform the ruler lifts his hand from a brushwood of papyrus an ibis takes wing wind in the crowns of giants of the forest Roman laughter and the merchant unties his purse shakes out amber the redolence of bread rising from the hearths of Jericho here and there a Hunnish girl brings light in the night sinks into a bearskin a Germanic beauty the breasts of the Venus of Věstonice revealed the cattle are lowing stinking a sheep’s fleece shepherds wandering the vaulted Carpathian ridge …” Drawing breath before his next work of great import Zvlčení [Growing Wild], Bajaja’s penned a lyrical, indeed epic-style work with echoes of the Nativity called Pastorální [Pastoral]. This oblique re-telling of the first Christmas (incorporating a glimmer of folk carols and rhymes) builds – in a manner typical of Bajaja – an arch over the ages, the very scene of the Nativity and the events surrounding the birth of the Messiah. Bajaja creates a parallel myth – or an anti-myth – by populating the scene with a wealth of figures historical and invented; these figures – geniuses, pariahs and potentates – provide a (sometimes monstrous) backdrop to a riotous assembly, the essence of which is the straightforward and homogeneous story of the first Christmas. As in Speaking is Silver and Duels, this backdrop rises above the precipices and plateaux of the everyday, above the miscellanea of episode and ephemera, above the distorted feelings and thoughts of those who have gone astray in the world and of those with a mission. Zvlčení, the allegorical title of Bajaja’s most recent work, is more suggestive of the human/social than the roving wolf pack of the story. (The title can be translated as “Growing Wild” or as “Becoming the Wolf”; excerpts have been translated into English under the former.) The pack has been driven from its valley in the Slovakian Carpathians to the forests and meadows of Moravian Wallachia; here the ‘humanized’ wolf community begins – for reasons of self-preservation – to divide itself into small, family-based cells. A removal from society into the privacy of the family is a theorem emblematic of this particular author. Nothing except solitude, the separation of the self from the chaos of human existence, makes it possible for Man to reflect on his own being, nature and eternity. Bajaja is implying that it would do us no harm if we were to withdraw from the insidious shelter of civilization and make an attempt to return to our earlier animal, lupine wildness; it might lead us to an understanding of the indivisibility of soul and nature, time and God, life and myth. In the night-time howls of wolves – or their ‘singing’ in the half-light of their Carpathian shelter – Bajaja attempts to express elementally yet verbally – in a kind of magical eulogy – a polysemic stele or an epitaph which overarches the reality of being. A herd of deer, too, listens to the singing of the wolves: “They stood there all dismay, their ears admitting a sound the like of which they had never before heard, as wolves had not been present in these surroundings for generations. Not even the magnificent sixteener – though he knew himself confronted with a portent – was able to interpret the sense of this communication formed under complex, vaulted skies. For all that, the libretto was of parsimonious design. flight hunger distance sun man dark refuge prey water now joy settlement anxiety I caution wickedness wind scent will rip river frost ash possess God blood light eyes law clouds come libation”

 

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The profile was updated in June 2006

 

Deutsch Antonín BAJAJA, Deutsch.doc

 

En français Antonín BAJAJA, En français.doc

E a.bajaja@tiscali.cz    

 

Foreign rights

Dana Blatná Literary Agency, www.dbagency.cz

 

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