Authors

Kahuda started as an underground poet on the Branické almanachy, but was from the beginning also writing prose fiction, and this soon became the focus of his literary endeavours. In his fiction, he long sought to express his generation’s views on life, and incorporated this into a fantasy-literature framework: in his writing, personal stories are usually set in a world that appears to be upside down, divested of all protective colouring, left to the tender mercies of the reader’s senses, and often genuinely defenceless. In depicting this drastic, brutal social context he makes ample use of techniques of Decadent and Naturalist writers. His world is almost entirely inhabited by inhuman beings, as in Příběh o baziliškovi (Tale of the Basilisk).The life’s journeys and aims of his protagonists, or indeed of their societies as a whole, occur not in a nascent state, but in one of permanent exhumation. (One of his novels is entitled Exhumace.) In his settings and his protagonists’ psyches the beastly, physiological and animalistic triumph. With depictions of natural scenery, which is sculptural in its suggestive timelessness and fascinating in its harmony with the unchanging laws of the inanimate world, the writer has tried to tone down and lighten up his scenes of a degenerating anthropomorphic universe: unlike the expressive rendering of human misery, such passages have been shaped by ‘high’, stylized diction, as in Veselá bída (Merry Misery). The conception of existence as an impenetrable chaos of evil phenomena, an infinite thicket of human senses and rudimentary experiences, reaches its apex in Kahuda’s first novel of recapitulation, Houština (Thicket). This detailed picture of his hero’s Lehrjahre (years of apprenticeship, childhood and youth) is conceived as a perpetual crossing over into the labyrinth, which is embodied by, among other things, a multitude of blind alleys, futile expeditions and wrong steps taken on the ‘journey of life’. The autobiographical tone of his fiction emphasizes the importance that intimate experiences and hidden obsessions have in the search for the meaning of life. The story reaches its climax in the closing chapters where his writing, initially genre-based, changes into a novel of initiation: the experience enables the protagonist, even if only theoretically, to begin to see, to emerge from the thicket of his own being and the world around him, and to reach an agreement with life. From a different point of view and in a different genre, Kahuda attempted to achieve an analogical recapitulation of another period of his life in his most recent, short novel Proudy (Streams). Here, he aspires to reflect on the impending midlife years, while still regarding everyday life mainly as an incessant ‘flow’ of the bizarre and grotesque, its significance for man’s existential problems usually being reflected in his attitude to sexuality. Kahuda developed the potential of his narration and philosophy of existence in another short story, ‘Technologie dubnového večera’ (The Technology of an April Evening). The two heroes, or antiheroes, of this macro-narrative head out to a small pub in old Prague one spring evening, only to begin there an endless dialogue about the world and themselves, telling stories about the mysteries of modern history, the even greater mysteries of woman’s soul, and above all woman’s body, until, finally, this geyser of narration changes into a mythological conversation, a true ode to the omnipresent, ever-hidden cosmogony of sex and the sexuality of the cosmos. Nonetheless, their viewpoint remains forever set in the nether-regions of this world, far beneath the stars of these esoteric, otherworldly heights. The entire twofold monologue takes place in the spirit of the babbling (pábení) of Hrabal, about something set in the amplitude of the pub-type tragic-grotesque and dictated by the bright glow of sexuality and the horror of it, drawing its force from a cosmogonic, subliminal pansexualism, from its poetically elemental physiology and its physiologically intoxicating poetry. Václav Kahuda here takes a step forward, joining the vanguard of Bohumil Hrabal and Ladislav Klíma.

(vn)

E-mail: kahuda@post.cz

Deutsch Václav KAHUDA, Deutsch.doc

En français Václav KAHUDA, En français.doc