Authors
Eva KANTŮRKOVÁ
Eva Kantůrková was born on May 11, 1930, in Prague. Her mother was a writer and father a journalist. She worked as an editor before entering university. She later graduated from Charles University’s Faculty of Arts with a degree in philosophy and history. For a short time she worked at Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) and in the Central Office for Book Culture in Czechoslovakia. As a dissident she was interned for ten months in 1981, and in 1985 she became spokeswoman for Charter 77. After 1989 she served for two years as a representative on the Czech National Council. Starting in 1998 she headed for several years the Department of Literature and Libraries at the Ministry of Culture. From 1994 to 1996 and again in autumn 2004 she served as president of the Writers’ Association. She lives in Prague.
Kantůrková’s extensive literary oeuvre is characterized by many diverse genres and a methodical variation of themes and narrative styles. She debuted as a fiction writer during the second half of the 1960s. Although welcomed as a considerable talent in contemporary Czech prose, it was clear that she was searching for her own intrinsic mode of creativity. As later became evident, her work would accommodate several “autonomous” narrative levels and in each of them Kantůrková skillfully develops her own style of storytelling. Her early work also displayed this distinctive poetics of the dissimilar: in the novel Smuteční slavnost [Funeral Celebration] she raised the relevant question of moral unrest when she chose as the novel’s theme the forced collectivization of Czechoslovak villages after the communist coup in February 1948 and the “funereal” consequences produced by this process; almost diametrically opposite was the grotesque psychodrama Pozůstalost pana Ábela [Mr. Abel’s Estate], which brings to mind the tragicomic yarns of Ladislav Fuks’s first books. At the end of the 1960s Kantůrková began to work on a loose trilogy, of which only the first book, Po potopě [After the Flood], was published (and was ignorantly left out of the entry about her in the Dictionary of Czech Writers since 1945). The second book, Černá hvězda [Black Star], appeared only in samizdat and on an exile publisher. It was in these novels, which were full of autobiographical experiences, that Kantůrková found her theme: the complex psychological mosaic of the postwar decades and confronting the fates of “active” characters to recapitulate society’s former illusions, and in particular its disillusionments. What stands out in these books are the sensitive character sketches and the feel for the atmosphere of the period. Inspired by these vivid returns to the past, Kantůrková tried her hand at drawing parallels between recent social and political developments and bygone historical epochs in books that were likewise not officially published. Copious biblical allusions are found in the novel Pán věže [Lord of the Tower] while a later work, Jan Hus, straddles the border between classic belles-letters and literary nonfiction. Before 1989 she wrote what is perhaps her most important documentary prose (later made into a film), Přítelkyně z domu smutku [Girlfriends from the House of Misery], which drew on her own experience as an inmate in Ruzyně prison. While a dissident, she also published critical and journalistic articles (later collected in the volume Valivý čas proměn [The Rolling Time of Change]. In addition to novels, Kantůrková writes short stories (after all, she debuted in this genre). The aforementioned documentary perspective of the world and its real actors, which she so inventively employed in Přítelkyně z domu smutku, also found a place in her post-revolution memoirs, Památník [The Monument], Záznamy paměti [Notes of Memory]. Written mostly to try to capture the zeitgeist of that time, they repeatedly use a diction that is extremely polemical (yet understanding) and subjective. She took her unfinished trilogy from the normalization period in a specific direction with her greatest work, the memoir novel Zahrada dětství jménem Eden [A Garden of Childhood Called Eden] (glaringly omitted from the 2000 edition of the Dictionary of Czech Writers). Kantůrková reaches back to the distant 1940s for the novel’s retrospective narration of the heroine’s childhood and adolescence. At the turn of the new century, after her memoir Nejsi [You Are Not], Kantůrková has published her most mature work, which has undeservedly been overlooked by the critics. Her latest books, Nečas and Nečasův román [Nečas’s Novel], are inspired by postmodern writing, a particular approach already present in the embryonic stages of her narrative. Yet they also mark a return to her older existential themes as well (in this case brought to bear on the specific fate of a writer as (un)social animal, or, if you will, general human fate in times that even to the fictive writer Nečas appear as endless confusion, or a pandemonium of thought, and above all, the chaos of the world).
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Eva KANTŮRKOVÁ, Deutsch.doc
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