Authors

The verse of Miloš Doležal is a fading echo of Bohuslav Reynek, František Halas, Jakub Deml and František Hrubín in late twentieth-century Czech poetry. In Doležal’s work, however, the myth of the countryside is not merely an evocation of shades of the past or a mere landscape painting or idyll of what once was but no longer is. He is not a nostalgic lyric poet, but a being in search of the lost community of humankind, the proximity of life in a village, and the union of souls and of Man and Nature. Consequently, he does not approach his subject matter and forms of rural abandonment in an existentially Heideggerian way, that is to say, he does not distance himself from them by naming them; instead, he tries to call back ostensibly archaic things and events by making them the centre of his attention again. Doležal’s first work of verse, Podivice (The Village of Podivice), was reproached by some critics for having an almost biblical pathos, a borrowed, eclectic, symbolic character, sacral metaphors, immobility and rigidity of poetic action. Few critics noticed that in this book the poet was following in the footsteps of Jiří Orten and possibly also of Josef Hora rather than in those of Deml in the little town of Tasov or Bohuslav Reynek in Petrkov, regardless of how attractive he obviously found those two poets from the Moravian Highlands. But in Podivice he still lacks both Reynek’s sense of being outcast, alone, and the venomous spite and irony of Deml. The verse is boyishly pure, amatory and faltering like Orten’s. From the gloomily mythical appearance of country cottages, barns, stables, cherry and apple orchards, Doležal longs to craft not the naturally pure, down-to-earth story, but one humanely knotty, not Arcadian but dark, dramatic and classically brutal as in the works of Aeschylus. In the recesses of Podivice move strange, stray, roaming beings, descendents of Josef Čapek’s ‘Pilgrim with a Limp’, to whose fate no key can be found. The contours of the solitary rural figures descended from biblical characters do not end by passing over the horizon, but by falling into ever darker ravines: ‘Among the smooth stones of the stream is thy portion; they are thy lot’ (Isaiah 57.6). The mythologization and the casting of spells over a concrete place in the Highlands intensify in the rigorously composed Obec (Community). In poetic miniatures about concrete persons he fully develops Holan’s principle of the poem-epic. The confirmed bachelor Josef Škareda, the village idiot Kamil Havlíčků (‘who used to show his bared bottom to the curious old women of the village’), the gravedigger Ladislav Nermut and others in Doležal’s poetic frescoes are as much mortal beings as they eternal archetypes, the embodiment of life, love and death. Compared to Podivice, which is lyrically imbued with spirit, Obec makes things concrete; story-telling gives way to the rawness of the seen and suspected, reality alternates with dream. In his next book, Les (Forest), Doležal changes his poetic course back to the boundary of life and inertia, of the community of human beings and isolation in it, to the mystery of secluded places in the woods and labyrinths of natural temples, whose pillars comprise the trunks of mountain spruces and pines. ‘Portraits’ or pictures of trees, branches, in the air of clinched crowns, of leaves, of the impenetrability and irreversibility of roots, form, with few exceptions, the whole metaphorical arsenal of this work. Here the author comes close to Deml’s verse from the collection Moji přátelé (My Friends). He sees biblical prophets in trees that rise high up into the sky. His trees are endowed with human attributes; here, Nature is subjected to the laws of anthropomorphization: the little trunk of a mulberry, furiously burning on the Easter fire, is, for the poet, the embodiment of the traitor Judas. The centre of gravity of Doležal’s České feferony (Czech Hot Peppers) lies in drawings and sketches like those made by the author Jan Čep, not lacking moral lessons, but imbued with a detachment established with the aid of the grotesquely ironic mood of these ‘feuilletons’. The poet’s sarcasm is intensified by the way in which global civilization has penetrated his native Moravian Highlands and by how the contemporary countryside is changing in connection with the new Establishment, which in Doležal’s hands, sounds clumsy and puppet-like, sometimes severe and, as in the writing of Jan Neruda, bristling.

(js)

E-mail: milos.dolezal@rozhlas.cz

This author profile was last updated in 2008

Deutsch Miloš DOLEŽAL, Deutsch.doc

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