Authors

In the 70s she worked as a boiler attendant, cleaner, storekeeper and archivist in the Office for Patents and Inventions. She cooperated with FS Barrandov (on the film script Dvě ženy v jezeře) and Czech Radio (adaptations and dramatizations of literary works); after 1989 she worked, among other things, as an editor for the publishing house Český spisovatel. Prague’s Viola theatre company staged her poetic composition Netopýr v podkroví (1985–86), and Theatre Na zábradlí (2007–08) her stage adaptation of Sebranci (with F. Hrdlička). František Hrdlička was born on January 7th 1937 in Litoměřice, did not complete his studies at the Medical Faculty of Charles University in Prague, and later graduated in dramaturgy from Prague’s DAMU. He worked as a carer in children’s homes and a technical editor in the Office for Patents and Inventions. As a playwright and assistant director, he worked for the S. K. Neumann Theatre, the E. F. Burian Theatre, Theatre Na zábradlí, Czech Radio and Viola. From 1969–72 he founded and, together with Miloš Horanský, ran Bílé divadlo. Since 1973 he has been on an invalidity pension. From 1996 he worked as a teacher in several colleges and universities in Prague. With Z. Bratršovská he has translated the work of I. Bachmann, W. Schiffer, I. Weber and H. Brooks; with L. Hustolesová that of M. Gorky and A. N. Ostrovsky.

The phenomenon of the literary partnership, which has developed in Czech and world literature since the age of romanticism, would be worthy of an extensive literary-scientific study. Zdena Bratršovská and František Hrdlička ought to be mentioned in it, even though they have also continued to create independent works. Since their juvenile years, both authors have been attracted to the theatre and it was through the unofficial Bílé divadlo that they got to know each other. That (in its time) isolated community, vaguely reminiscent of a strict and heretical sect, influenced their poetics in a fundamental way, both in the poetic texts which Bratršovská published in book form from 1983, and also in the prose or dramatic works created by both authors. A panoramic look back at this underground theatre activity, which was inspired by Jung and Artaud, by the production methods of Grotowski, Brook, Kantor or the American “Living Theatre”, is offered by the book Zpráva o Bílém divadle, in which the creed of the authors is also made clear: to discover the most deeply hidden motives of every person, to find a way to communicate them and never to serve any ideology. Bílé divadlo, with very few exceptions, did not play for the public. Rather they played for themselves. It was their own form of anthropological research, which through mystically-related illusion and theatrical harmony was supposed to uncover a universal source of human creativity or de facto, in Jung’s terms, a collective unconscious. Bratršovská and Hrdlička’s theatrical endeavours as well as their literary works thus offer a significant intellectual alternative, which resisted and still resists normalized society, afflicted by boredom and banality, as well as contemporary society, founded on profit and exalted individualism. Both authors opted for literary cooperation after normalization pressure thwarted the further operation of Bílé divadlo. Their first joint work was Sebranci, from 1974–75, a novel about youthful rebellion, which in a stylized form mirrors some experiences from the previous experiment. The range of encounters and separations, agreements and resignations, bold and secretive fascinations, positive and negative attitudes in this prose formed a mosaic of internal monologues, developing the ideas of Camus’s existentialism. We can also read the poetry of Z. Bratršovská through the optics of topicality and timelessness, which is another typical feature of their work, starting with verses from her debut work Džbán bez ucha and continuing to the epic lyrical story of the almost Holanesque “trialogue” Netopýr v podkroví. In her first book, the poetess compares her life so far to an old jug “that has lost its handle along the way”: beyond the vista of lovers’ quarrels and microstories of fleeting romances, we can sense a rift through which we glimpse a universe of anxieties and fears of unfulfilled feelings, pursuing modern man at every step. All this is masked beneath a sort of Villonesque game, or in the irony of the cursed poets, outcasts from the main stage. The reader of these verses is captivated by their genuine openness and lack of censorship, but also by a vulnerable, perhaps even wounded fragility („Mockrát jsem začínala / nanovo. Stála jsem u pásu / i prala. Vždy mne zajímala / spíš gesta – ptáci v zimě –, / než argumenty,“ we read in the opening lines of Džbán bez ucha) or pressed by an almost animal sense of anxiety, which also creeps into many other verses as an undertone („snad se v tom zlatovlasém parnu rozpomenu, / snad nejsem bezdomek a snad jsem lezla z klína / s týmž křikem jako jiní pro svou první plenu…“). In contrast to Džbán bez ucha, in which the authoress presented herself as an enfant terrible of the stagnant waters of normalization, her second collection, Městské šance, brought a more Parnassian and melic poetry. The vigorous gestures with which she speaks in her debut suddenly become subdued; cryptogram and allegory here alternate with a tendency towards the poetics of the everyday, which in her work is an undeniable relic of the 60s in Czech poetry. The elemental force is directed into civilization, into a race around city walls and outskirts, overgrown lawns and temptations. Here love changes into a sort of theatre for two people, who long to be one being but at the same time are always different in some way. This dramatic tension, just like the psychologically analytical nuancing, radiates not only from her epic lyrical composition Netopýr v podkroví, but also from the jointly written novel Hotel Rezeda. The transience of a stay in this sort of symbolic hotel of the world, where life takes place on the surface and almost unobserved, transforms into a tragedy or farce, where man finds himself in a position of voluntary or enforced exile with the status of a “one-night” being, also appears as a central theme in other works by Bratršovská and Hrdlička, for example in the triptych Scény z mužského života and in the prose works assembled in the collection Cesta k močálu. Zdena Bratršovská and František Hrdlička are certainly not the type of authors who spend their whole lives re-writing the same book. Their individual works markedly differ both in terms of style and genre: whilst the novel Hotel Rezeda takes place on the whole against a realistic backdrop, in the setting of a hotel, hospital and university, Scény z mužského života, like its counterpart, Budík pro Šípkové Růženky, contains a trio of intimate testimonies by men and women with different characters, which in their own way are reminiscent of a painting by the Norwegian symbolist Edvard Munch entitled The Three Ages, in which three female figures are trapped within a night-time scene, even though the three figures are in effect one woman. In other works, such as the collection of short pieces from a rural setting Samé milé pitvorky, the duo of authors are inclined towards satire and horror; elsewhere, for example in the historical play Horká krajina, set in the time of the conquistador Cortes, or in their radio plays, they have recourse to allegory. Although Bratršovská and Hrdlička generally portray characters from a wide variety of social and educational backgrounds, in some of their prose works it is possible to distinguish autobiographical traces, which are eagerly sought by critics and readers of the two authors. These elements are of course most evident in the retrospective novel Rezavá léta, in some of the stories in Renáta nad hlavou and in the delicately composed prose work O dvou písařích, in which they even quote their dream inventory. Their views on social and cultural developments do not have to be sought in their literary works, since they simultaneously devote themselves to journalism and essay-writing, a selection of their work having been gathered in the collections Jak chutná nezávislost and Politikův umělec a umělcův politik. In addition, F. Hrdlička has assembled his pedagogical experiences in Průvodce po literárním řemesle, the second edition of which was published in 2008. The extensive prose, poetry, drama, journalism and translation work of both authors, as well as their poetics, which are attractive to readers, inspiring but also provocative, attest that the destiny of the creative spirit need not necessarily be an ascetic and taciturn isolation, but can also be a vocal dialogue between two partners, based upon a Buberesque tension between You and Me, which touches not only upon the surface but also the basis of our existence.

(js)

This author profile was last updated in 2008

Foreign rights

Dana Blatná Literary Agency, www.dbagency.cz