Authors

Beneš was a member of both the American and Czech PEN Clubs and the Confederation of Political Prisoners [of Czechoslovakia]. His choice of themes and the style and manner in which he presented his ideas would classify him as a provocateur or rebel, someone who would have a difficult time in a free and democratic society let alone one devastated by a socialist system lacking in scruples and conviction. He was the kind of writer whose own life provided inspiration. Uncompromising and in his own way confrontational, Beneš never lacked for subject matter. Beneš’s father had been a legionnaire and an architect who took part in building the border fortifications, and he was sacked from the Ministry of Defense after the Communist coup in February 1948. His firm belief that ideas need to be actively defended, his resistance to Bolshevism and admiration for the military found fertile ground in his son. In 1955 Beneš enrolled in the officers’ academy in Ružomberok, a step he later justified as a way to obtain weapons with which he would use to fight the regime. After six weeks, however, he was dismissed from the academy for fighting with a superior. During his compulsory military service he was accused of theft and sentenced to twenty-five months in jail. The actual circumstances surrounding this affair were captured in his novel Trojúhelník s madonou (Triangle with Madonna). Serving his sentence in a mine provided the subject matter for another novel, Kooperace (Cooperation), which was published as Druhý dech (Second Breath). The author’s views and fate closely resemble that of the novel’s main protagonist, a reckless pilot named Vojda, and as such he defines the experience of his literary hero as well as his own: “But in that prison, in contact with political prisoners, I matured. I fully came to understand that it was not possible to endure this regime, one had to actively oppose it. Or at least permanently resist it. This was my university.” Beneš became a political prisoner in 1966. He was sentenced to five years in prison for sending articles to Pavel Tigrid’s exile magazine Svědectví (Witness). Released in 1968 but about to be arrested again in 1969, he emigrated to the United States. Five of his books being prepared for publication in Czechoslovakia were then banned. A skilled storyteller, Beneš built tension in his stories and novels by creating distinctly opposite characters with conflicting points of view as well as plots that straddled the border separating the believable from the fantastical. His writing tended toward a crisp documentary style that mixed in the comedic of absurd situations. At the end of Druhý dech he writes: “In his position as narrator the author cannot promote any particular standpoint.” He was quite open, however, in vigorously defending his own views. Evidencing a noticeably educated grasp of the issues, Beneš the journalist was as irreverent and uncompromising as Karel Kryl, trenchant in his commentary and brilliant in his use of language. Beneš’s literary style is immanently readable and lively, similar in many ways to the works of Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký. His “post-exile” work, exhibiting the pride and deracination of the émigré, is peppered with biting irony and the courage to discuss the unpopular and taboo problems that have plagued Czech society since the end of the Second World War. Jan Beneš died June 1, 2007.

(mmm)

En français Jan BENEŠ, En français.doc