Authors
Irena DOUSKOVÁ
Czech prose-writer and journalist. She was born on 18 August 1964 in the Central-Bohemian mining town of Příbram, which has a rich literary tradition: it was home to the classic of Czech Roman Catholic literature, Jaroslav Durych (1886-1962), and to the great proponent of French poetry Hanuš Jelínek (1878-1944). But by the time Dousková was growing up the town of her birth was culturally dead, and the author herself wrote of ‘hellish, Bolshevik Příbram of mines and the military’. None the less, it was in Příbram that Dousková set her best-known book, the novella Hrdý Budžes (Pround Budžes), which gained added familiarity by being dramatised for the stage and television. The writer has lived for many years in Prague (where she graduated at Charles University’s Faculty of Law) and she currently edits the monthly Maskil, published by the Bejt Simcha Hebrew congregation.
Dousková entered the Czech literary context twice over: first in the early 1990s as a member of the LiDi society, when, jointly with other authors (including the future writer of short-stories Petr Ulrych [b. ]), she published the collection Pražský zázrak (A Prague Miracle, 1992). Before long, however, she switched to prose in which she is clearly most at home with the short story and medium-length fiction. Here she skilfully applies her three-dimensional view of human behaviour and offers her interpretation of change in the psychological atmosphere of both the public domain and the secret emotional life of her contemporaries. Her first little book, the epistolary novel Goldstein píše dceří (Goldstein writes to his daughter, 1997), was conspicuously autobiographical. In this prose début, wrongly neglected by the critics, the author succeeded in capturing the contrast between the two worlds of people ‘here’ and people ‘there’, that is, in exile; particularly convincing was her portrayal of the psychology of an ageing egocentric who is incapable of communicating with those about him because he is so absorbed with himself, his nostalgia and self-pity, but also with a genuine fear of loneliness. In this ‘un-modern’ epistolary genre Doušková found plenty to say about modern self-delusions and self-love and exhibited a fine sense for psychological narration. This disposition is eloquently displayed in her second book, the above-mentioned Hrdý Budžes (1998), a slim novel in which she returns (from the viewpoint of little girl growing up) with bitterish irony to her own childhood, spent in a small-town environment during the years of political degeneration following the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Those social convulsions are watched by the narrator as from within family relationships that are oppressively beset by the Absurdistan of the conditions of the time. Yet despite its obvious historical background, the novella Hrdý Budžes is not another socio-political statement on the age: its chief asset is its delicate presentation of the fragile world of the perceptive child in opposition to the tragic-grotesque reality ‘the other side of the glass’, the other side of the protective coloration of childhood. This work won its author considerable prestige in contemporary Czech literary circles. The author made no subsequent return to this theme, choosing for her third book, the diary-like Někdo s nožem (Someone with a knife, 2000), the subject of the various crossroads of middle age, but linked to the abrupt, breakneck changes of psychology in the Bohemian lands after 1989. This time her heroine is a woman whose marriage is in crisis, which she perceives acutely as the death throes of her world; she has been let down by all her previous experience, despite enjoying the material benefits of the Czech Republic since November 1989. Ghosts from the past rear their heads at every turn and her inability to communicate or find a common and uncoded language with those around her becomes a ghost of the present, from which there is no escape. Following Někdo s nožem Dousková could rightly be seen as a major representative of modern psychological prose with female characters and addressing specific female issues. As it transpired, though, the author only stepped up her search for topic and genre. Since then, Dousková has inclined strongly towards the short story while at the same time seeking to put off the shackles of modern traumas. In her first collection of short stories, Doktor Kott přemítá (The musings of Dr Kott, 2002), she evinced a vast range of pitches of genre and style, the basis of all theses mini-dramas of the everyday being an all-pervading tragic-grotesque sense of human inadequacy. Its ultimate consequence is that natural ties metamorphose into something close to those among a collection of curios. The author does not moralise, but merely reveals how far we have merged with the masks and rituals to which we submit without thinking and from which certain ‘gaping untruths’ inevitably hatch. The author’s view is mildly sardonic, but also very clear-sighted; she does not need to muse about the world since she understands it. That might well be why Dousková could reintroduce herself very soon with an entirely different narrative disposition: from the picturesque and bizarre in the modern world she moved to a series of apocryphal stories on the grand subject of violence in history; violence is usually associated with falsehood and even acknowledges falsehood as an infinite principle that permits violence to endure even in the name of contradictory moral imperatives. In the cycle of stories Čím se liší tato noc (What makes this night different, 2004) the reader is particularly struck by the writer’s historical pessimism, which also shines through the way she shapes what goes on backstage in her world of the Gospels. Here she also demonstrates her narrative skill in the evocation of history and her competence at penetrating the psychology of bygone ages, the contours of which she aptly stylises in order to illustrate the thesis at issue. Thus Irena Dousková is growing from having been a writer on contemporary themes and a fine connoisseur of the psychology of the everyday into a neo-classicist and reflective author whose choice is now whether to continue to hone her craft in the short story or, one day, to re-dedicate her narrative art to a larger format.
(vn)
Translation © 2005 David Short
Deutsch 
Irena DOUSKOVÁ, Deutsch.doc
En français Irena DOUSKOVÁ, En français.doc
