Authors

Gruša first made his mark on European literature with the unofficial publication of the novel Dotazník aneb modlitba za jedno město a přítele (The Questionnaire or Prayer for a Town and a Friend) – the first official publication of which was not until 1990. The book has both a Kafkaesque labyrinthine quality and an Orwellian eeriness, but there can also be found elements of Hašek’s absurdity and Hrabal’s palavering. In the nineteen chapters of a story/non-story, which is intimately commemorative and evocative of a bygone time, the author holds a fictional conversation with an official from the totalitarian regime while filling out an extensive and detailed questionnaire or form, which in an estranged world takes the place of an individual’s identity. The questionnaire chronologically follows the author’s alter ego John Chrysostom (Jan Zlatoústý) from his birth shortly before the start of the war, through the years of the Protectorate in a small town - which is partly the real town of Chlumec and partly fictional - to the end of the war and then up to the dark years of the 1950s when the narrator’s father became a Communist functionary in order to protect his family from persecution. The drama reaches a climax and ends at the point when the work was written – at the end of the 1960s, when both the author and narrator were establishing themselves in poetry, writing and journalism. According to some critics (eg Jakub Grombíř in the article Jak Oskar k Oskarovi přišel [How an Oskar came to Oskar], Aluze, 2/2006) Gruša comes very close to the German writer Günter Grass with his novel The Questionnaire. The narrative structure and the time period, set during the war and the postwar years, makes The Questionnaire particularly reminiscent of The Tin Drum from 1977. Unlike Grass, who incorporates elements of historical and psychological absurdity in The Tin Drum, in Gruša’s central book it is difficult to find a negative character or people succumbing to the demon of evil. Whilst in Grass everyone is guilty, and not only the “drummer” Oskar Matzerath, Gruša’s small-town characters, no matter how much they are touched by the existential anxiety of modernity, remain locked in the compassionate dimension of Švejk or one of Hrabal’s palaverers. Grombíř characterizes Gruša’s characters as people “fending off the surrounding darkness through endearing idiosyncratic activities such as breeding cats or constructing flying machines. Against the manipulating “questionnaire” of a world of abnormality and absence of humanity, the “Chlumec folk” fight using their animalism, an emphasis on earthly delights reminiscent of Poláček’s First Republic heroes, as well as a timeless hyperbole in the style of Boccaccio or Rabelais. In the shadow of The Questionnaire and other prose works stands Gruša the poet, author of several collections and lyrical compositions which he wrote at the beginning of the 1960s (at that time in Czech), and which were also published in exile when he was writing verse mainly in German (they were later translated into Czech and published, for example, in the Torst volume Les Babylon.: Bludné kameny [Wandering Stones]. 1998). The book Právo útrpné [Torture] (2003) is a return to the first five collections from the 1960s. With Torna [The Satchel] (1962), his first collection of poetry, Gruša entered into a generation of Czech poets that was both strong and numerous, attaching itself to either the Halas or Holan wave, or the poetics of Skupina 42 (Group 42), although without sharing their vitalism. It was a generation of poets noted for their scepticism, and, at best, their absurdist humour. Gruša made his debut at the same time as Wernisch, Kabeš, Pištora, Brousek and Diviš, but he differed from these authors’ occasional transrational experiments by leaning more towards an earthliness and the certainties of the home and family. He was influenced by Ladislav Fikar’s poetry collection Samotín, as well as by the tradition of Karel Hynek Mácha, Otokar Březina and Jakub Deml, which from the time of the romantic poem Máj (May) with which he interweaves an existentialist undertone. In the fifth collection Modlitba k Janince (A Prayer to Janinka) from 1963-1973, which is a memorial for a dead woman, culminating in Gruša’s erotic or eroticised tone of life on “the humps, on the breasts” and hands laid upon the “marble of the lap”. Whenever the erotic metaphors sound decadent and free, the author is not using them in a Baudelaire-style poetry of “the excitement of pain”, but is rather a twin of Václav Hrabět, whose cult reached a peak at exactly the same time as Gruša took his first steps in poetry. In the collection Právo útrpné, which was banned in the 1960s, the poet is close to Karel Šiktanec’s heroic and mythologising Český orloj (The Czech Astronomical Clock). The country, the land of one’s birth, which used to be certain and irrefutable, is suddenly under threat. Values are disintegrating and restrictions and warning signs increase. It was precisely here that Gruša’s prophetic voice was heard and it sounded unusual not only within the context of the lyrical 1960s, but also of the whole previous century of objectivity and the levelling out of values. In Právo útrpné the author touches the basis of existence or border areas where the Máchaesque post-romantic poet goes to “drink from the grave”. In 2001 Gruša brought out his Czech-German collection of poetry Wacht am Rhein aneb Putovní ghetto, for which he received the Magnesia Litera Prize and the prestigious Jaroslav Seifert Prize. Its civil tone and anti-poetic nature harmonise with the disappearance of the melodic element in today’s world, but here the poet gets himself into the difficult position of the all-knowing, all-seeing commentator on the moral, aesthetic and historical political chaos, to which we cannot turn a blind eye but must remain vigilant. The poetics of the collections from the 1960s are desolate and the tone alternates in a manner similar to the moralist verses of Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborská, as well as non-Polish authors such as the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky. At the beginning of the 1970s, Gruša along with Ludvík Vaculík started the samizdat edice Petlice (Padlock Editions) in which he published his prose work during the first half of the ‘70s. In 1973, under the pseudonym Samuel Lewis, he wrote Mimner aneb Hra o smrďocha [Mimner or the Stinker Game], Dámský gambit [Ladies Gambit] (1973), Modlitba k Janince [A Prayer to Janinka] (1975), the aforementioned Dotazník [The Questionnaire] (1975) and finally the novel Dr. Kokeš Mistr Panny [Dr. Kokeš] (1980). His most significant work is probably Mimner aneb Hra o smrďocha with the subtitle Atmar tin Kalpadtia (News from Kalpadocia). It is a complex, polythematic, experimental text, which refers to a strange, primitive, evil, cold world. On the one hand it is an Orwellian paramyth and pseudohistorical epic concerning the fictional civilization of Kalpadocia (slightly reminiscent of Musil’s Kakania in The Man Without Qualities) and its perverse ideology which does not recognise emotion and whose cult is cruelty and violence, the only possible dimension being a devoted belief in “ervet” where the culmination of everyone’s life is premature death. This strange, deranged game with death, which in the novel is called “mimner” in the Kalpadocian language, is reminiscent of the fanaticism of the Japanese wartime kamikaze pilots, but also of ancient cults and sacrifices, where people went willingly to their death due to their belief in an unknown, supreme god. The main character of this tale of Kalpadocian sacrificial death as the most perfect form of existential vertiginousness is the almost Kafkaesque, nameless K., who appears from outside and gradually becomes the prey of the Kalpadocian civilization, a stinker, a foreign element whom it is necessary to subjugate using all possible means, including perks, Faustian bribes or the mania for drugs and free love. The author sometimes adopts an almost icy detachment from the gruesome story of K., who by the end becomes a worshipper of premature death, mimner, as a way out from supposed despair. The parallel here with communist ideology is obvious. In the 1990s, when Gruša returned from exile and devoted himself intensively to political and diplomatic work, he only had time to write essays or studies concentrating on the themes of civilization, culture, sociology and politics, including the complex issue of Czech-German relations. In 2003 he brought out the collection of essays Šťastný bezdomovec (The Happy Homeless Man). Within these essays he attempts to get to the heart of literary life, which according to him arches over the whole world, but which is beginning to crumble as the lyrical being is driven out of the familiar environment, or – in Gruša’s words – into a “wandering ghetto”. Just as with Pound, with Gruša we see today’s poet as a prophet as well as a castaway. Unlike a dictator, politician or moralist, who are people of history, the poet is modest and marginal, his logos unthinkable without the prefix “dia”, as he is constantly in dialogue, asking questions. Paradoxically, however, when addressing Czech-German issues Gruša commends the stereotype of historical, neighbourly prejudices, of Hegelian absolutes as well as parochial publicans: “The Czech views the German as being a thinker in absolutes, who fails in relative things, whilst the German thinks of the Czech as a relativist, in whose hands the thing itself finally dissolves.” It is not until the conclusion of the book that Gruša suggests a solution. The fate of the exile or emigrant, and not only his own fate, is seen as Goethe-esque exoticism, while the real Heaven on Earth, in a heartfelt Comenius-like manner, is a paradise which one can find at home and more explicitly within oneself.

Jiří Gruša died October 28, 2011.

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This profile was last updated on November 1st 2011

Deutsch Jiří GRUŠA, Deutsch.doc

Interview with Jiří Gruša by Ana Lucic