Authors

The poetry of Stanislav Dvorský has – owing to the unpropitious circumstances of the time in which much of it was written – reached its readership with a delay, in fragmentary form and often at odds with chronology. Dvorský’s work has yet to receive the recognition which is its due, nor has it been accorded sufficient appraisal by critics and commentators. Part of the reason for this is doubtless the fact that Dvorský’s poetry is not easily and immediately accessible to those who seek to interpret it; to a great extent it is tied to the “generational sensibility” of the Sixties and Seventies. This might be viewed otherwise, however. Dvorský’s poems are on the one hand timeless, anchored in the imaginative-existential power of art, on the other tightly bound to the time in which they were created. The slow, static, descriptive, exhaustive investigation of the world – a world which is no longer redolent of Teige – resonates with echoes of contemporary trends of absurd and existentialist literature. At a certain stage in Dvorský’s writing one might think his patron to be Samuel Beckett, their common ground ways of understanding or the study of misunderstanding, were Dvorský not subject to many other influences and did his work not ultimately fulfil the maxim of Maurice Blanchot: “A work always means not to know that art already exists, not to know that the world already exists.” In simplication we can claim that Dvorský the ex-surrealist de facto joined the contemporary stream of absurd literature, and that this served to barb his spiteful imaginative lyricism with social criticism. His relationship with the absurd is rooted in method: if I am unable to find a meaningful description by which I can recognize the world, I will describe at least a small, often trivial slice of it. Like his post-surrealist contemporaries, the author is “watchful”, not wishing to succumb to the sense of wonderment and beauty and the radiant metaphors of an avant-garde which has disappointed or, rather, lost its grip on reality. Now that we are engaged in investigating the influences which have collaborated in the forming of Stanislav Dvorský’s poetics, we should mention modern art, photography and – perhaps most important of all – jazz music. The influence of jazz in Dvorský’s work is more apparent in its atmosphere than in its material attributes. The poet attempts to identify barely identifiable moods, not least the strange melancholia and silent anger of the times. These are moods which a jazz saxophonist might succeed in expressing; hence the wordsmith strays into the realms of “jazz hallucination” or even “verbal music”, as Petr Král (who is of Dvorský’s generation) has written. Elsewhere Král states: “[Dvorský] calls this poetics ‘word constellations’, in which we find the consistent exploitation of the specific. The poetry takes in the expressive power of individual word encounters: intoxicating collocations in which the verbal – half conceptual, half purely sonic – and graphic aspects conceal all the others (plot, contemplative, metaphorical), achieve independence, and the substance of the communication is shifted to the ‘static’ play of echoes, the transmitting of words to words as though they were signals from a lighthouse.” Král has often repeated his belief that this semantic freedom is a further reason for Dvorský’s success in catching a “generational sensibility”; but it is precisely by this that the limits of understanding are withheld from other readers. Behind Dvorský’s textual rebuses we sense an irony, a feeling of futility in the face of the stagnation of the times, a suspicion of words on the one hand and faith in art on the other, all overlaid with more irony – a range of feelings with which today’s reader may not always identify. Nor may we be stimulated by them or understand them fully. Yet still they provoke us and make us uneasy. How do they achieve this? Another paradox. Dvorský’s poems provoke us by their lack of elation, their lack of passion, their anti-romanticism, their Kafkaesque coldness within which we sense a fire; they provoke us most by that which they fail to contain. The long “litanies” we find so often in a writer are usually driven by passion or rage. This is not the case with Dvorský: his calm, almost stoical voice mutters in peculiar fashion, ponders the ostensibly self-evident. In so doing it unmasks quite a few illusions in which modern art and even language itself – which is officially hitched to some kind of yoke – are enveloped. His self, his own life – these are what the poet attempts to mythicize by his art, meanwhile doing all he can to negate them. It reminds one of walking on stilts that have already been cut into: “birds of passage still shimmer in the corridors of a blustery structure / by the end of this line in decay” (A Certain Sickness). And how do Dvorský’s poetics reconcile themselves to surrealism? Let us take a couple of examples of remarkable similes from the work: “his ears … were prim as yesterday’s fishing”; “a night … frosty as a brow scored with chalk”. This is no shrill surrealism; it is a somewhat confusing straining out of the relations among words. Of the dolled-up structure of science and art remains only a “mould of reason”, sarcasm and remnants of the imagination: “under the roots of the solemn trees they drilled into our veins / wriggling like chopped-up earthworms”. Erstwhile conquerors are “now on the horizon luminescent with hope, sort of putrefactive stumps”. We cannot claim for Dvorský the striking power of a Karel Šebek or the artist’s palette of a Pavel Řezníček (nor would these be in Dvorský’s programme), but beneath his “pale greys”, his vagueness and equivocation the reader can find his/her own deep “submarine structures”. And in Dvorský there is a further paradox: we sense the exactitude of the images and the harshness of the imagination, no matter how little unity there appears to be between these and, let us say, psychical automatism or jazz improvization. Dvorský’s work is not a collection of beautiful or outlandish images; rather, it is an imaginative contemplation of the world. It is not belles lettres, but, in the words of Vratislav Effenberger, it is “a dark pounding under the floorboards of belles lettres”.

(jn)

E-mail: stan.da@seznam.cz

Deutsch Stanislav DVORSKÝ, Deutsch.doc

En français Stanislav DVORSKÝ, En français.doc