Authors
Vladimír BINAR
The writer and critic Vladimír Binar was born on 6 October 1941 in Velké Meziříčí. He graduated in Czech studies and philosophy at Charles University, Prague, and taught at the Arts Faculty there for a number of years. Thereafter he spent many years working as a freelance translator (with a brief spell as editor at a publishing house) before returning to the university in 1990. Several periods spent in French Polynesia left their imprint on his fiction, which he did not publish until 1990. He has also proved an outstanding editor of spiritual literature. He lives in Prague.
Although the major literary historian and editor Vladimír Binar wrote some verse and prose in his youth, it was at a more mature age that he began to write in earnest. First he completed the books Playback (1981) and Emigrantský snář (An émigré’s dream-book, 1985) for the samizdat series Rukopisy VBF Praha (for which also he co-edited, inter al., the Works of Jakub Deml [1878-1961]), while his other prose and verse of the period has appeared since 1989 in journals, or is still in manuscript. Binar’s magnum opus, the memoir novel Playback, similarly had to wait twenty years for a ‘proper’ book edition. This work is a remarkable amalgam of every conceivable observation, impression and experience, including various visionary and imaginative motifs, the writer’s attempt to address the present state of the world amounting finally to a fascinating experiment in narration. At various stages and in various contexts the narration may take on different, if not quite contradictory, meanings that modify the original message. With evident exaggeration, Binar himself calls his narrative method, as applied in this novel, ‘somnambular ramblings’, though this conceals his perseverance in seeking to see the harmonious unity of an apparently disharmonious world at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. His periods spent in French Polynesia, especially Tahiti, are most apparent in Binar’s epistolary prose Emigrantský snář, which consists of his letters dated between October 1983 and August 1985. The collection might be somewhat oddly described as a ‘novel in letters and postcards’, though it amounts pre-eminently to indirect discourses with the self (albeit they are intended for others) by the writer-intellectual, a Central European living in Husákian Czechoslovakia; in his epistolary, in no small measure confessional, reflections he is comparing thoroughly disparate worlds, or thoroughly disparate societies and cultures. What is dominant at first is the writer’s beautiful ‘dream of Tahiti’, where Binar’s narrator, in the role of the author’s alter ego, admires the harmony and beauty of a landscape so remote from the continent of Europe. Gradually, however, the semi-fairytale ‘Polynesian dream’ fragments and decays with the intrusion of the day-to-day reality of this exotic topos. Above all, we lose from sight the initial idea that it might be possible to create, if briefly, a non-imaginary intellectual arc between the Bohemian lands and Tahiti, as was the author’s intention. It is worth mentioning that the fictional guide on Binar’s epistolary adventure is Paul Gauguin, or, more accurately, we are witnesses to the artist’s symbolic presence; Gauguin had gone to Tahiti at the same age as, later, the Czech writer. However, the famous painter did not have to grapple with the inevitable bureaucracy that might have made his stay ‘temporary’ – unlike Vladimír Binar, the authentic writer of this epistolary dream-book, in the 1980s.
(vn)
[Translation © David Short 2005]
This author profile was last updated in 2005
Deutsch 
Vladimír BINAR, Deutsch.doc
En français Vladimír BINAR, En français.doc
