Authors

After the November Revolution of 1989 he decided to return home and has since lectured at the Charles University Biological Science Faculty, where he made his name as an outstanding authority and duly earned the title of Professor of the Philosophy and History of the Natural Sciences. In the second half of the 1990s he published several illuminating volumes that attracted considerable interest: Dějiny biologického myšlení (A history of biological thought, 1997), Lidská přirozenost (Human nature, 1998), Příroda a kultura – Svět jevů a svět interpretací (Nature and culture: the world of phenomena and the world of interpretations, 2000), and, finally, Mimikry, aposematismus a příbuzné jevy (Mimicry, aposematism and allied phenomena, 2000); in preparation he has a popular scientific publication on the problems of power, sickness and psychosomatics. He also publishes his scholarly works in English. As his creed he takes the Stoic Cleanthes’ proverb, transmitted by Seneca as: Fata volentem ducent, nolentem trahunt. The biologist Stanislav Komárek demonstrated his literary bent early, after leaving university and during his period in exile, where, with the small Vienna publisher Alfa, he published his first collection of verse, Kartografie (Cartography, 1986). He continued writing verse after returning home, though the collections Kaligrafie (Calligraphy, 1994) and Holografie (Holography, 1998) appeared only in small printings. None the less, in the early 1990s it was already plain that the author’s early and later verse (of the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s) is conspicuously intellectualist, with an incontestable philosophical virtuosity, though always within the lyrical context of a poet’s testimony; and that its dominant characteristic is sarcastic meditation. Many of his texts were based on motifs of travel, supported by the author’s historical erudition, making them all products of empirical knowledge. Yet these are no mere rhymes of a tourist, but expressions of the author’s particular inventiveness, arising out of a dramatic progress through time and space, time reaching back to ancient pre-history, and space embracing the entire globe over which the artist roams. In addition, some of Komárek’s texts are model paraphrases of various types of folk literature, usually Asian. During the 1990s, the scholar Stanislav Komárek was known in literary circles not pre-eminently as a poet, but as an extraordinarily erudite essayist, whose particular aptitude was for inventively applying the newest discoveries in biology to the analysis of countless social and cultural issues of the age. We find this in, for example, the collections Sto esejů o přírodě a společnosti (One hundred essays on nature and society, 1995) or Mír s mloky (Peace with the newts, 2003). Some of these thematically quite varied and methodologically inspiring essays have also appeared in the literary fortnightly Tvar, under the ‘Poklesky’ rubric for new writing. They contain striking analyses of sundry ‘biologico-social’ models and stereotypes of behaviour and thought. A significant shift in Komárek’s literary career came in the summer of 2001, when this renowned biologist and essayist (and almost unknown poet) completed in Prague and Kardašova Řečice (the little town in South Bohemia close to the writer’s place of birth) his first novel, which he gave the somewhat fantastical, not to say post-modern, ironic title Opšlstisova nadace (The Opšlstis Foundation, 2002); to which title he added the subtitle: Nepravidelný roman (An irregular novel). As the author himself says, by an irony of fate the book was written just under a month before the September attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Komárek’s Opšlstisova nadace is a sample of sophisticated prose that has numerous satirical sub-texts, that is, a type of prose that is poorly represented in contemporary Czech fiction. Moreover, it is an exemplar of the kind of literary structure that in both conception and execution embodies a modern (or post-modern) alternative to the Bildungsroman of the past, one particular prose genre that is almost absent from Czech classical literature. What we find here (though the material is drawn from the remote past) is a narrative phenomenon whose ancient prototype might be considered Goethe’s enlightened Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre – except that these classics gravitate towards harmony, while Komárek’s hero, in accord with the author’s sceptical view of history, emphatically does not. The novel opens as an autobiographical story that the writer claims is also a ‘cumulative biography of our entire generation generally and its exiled section in particular’. Its hero, a Czech arts student, decides, at the start of the 1980s, in favour of life in exile (in neighbouring Austria), and there he seems gradually to enter some unknown, entirely new time and space civilisation. He appears to be circulating in the static and ideologically almost sterile, backward-looking microcosm of the Vienna bureaucracy, yet one moment, one decisive encounter, suffices and the writer begins to unfold before the reader’s eyes a post-modern, rather panoptical drama with countless authorial digressions. The protagonist’s main interest is the history of the janissaries, those soldiers of the Ottoman ruler, most of whom were of Slav origin – and in the process he runs across various secret societies and fraternities. Soon his search (or groping) begins to recall the path taken by a novice during various ritual initiations: he too wants to be gradually initiated into a version of true knowledge. Ultimately he appears to have disappeared from the world, to have been predestined to disappearance. Yet the world where this has all taken place also disappears: the previous pillars of secular knowledge and spiritual cognition have collapsed. For 1989 has come – and, as the author puts it, ‘the lot of all those who know is solitude’. Should it seem that the artistic spokesmen of several recent generations have shared an idea of the ‘end of the world’ that has become almost totally debased by being repeated so frequently, then Stanislav Komárek will be found offering a much more serenely, more sedately narrated version of this vision in his second prose work, Černý domeček (The little black house, 2004), which is pitched in the manner of a chronicle. Here too he is coming to terms with an ‘end’ of sorts, this time in a retrospective of the entire twentieth century via the life of one small South-Bohemian town and the impact on it, felt with various degrees of intensity, of such great, usually tragic, moments in history as the ‘real end of a great war’ in May 1945 as manifested far away from big cities and ‘big history’. In Černý domeček Komárek succeeds in wedding his philosopher and fiction-writer selves beneath the all-embracing cloak of his sarcastic account, yet the action scenes still come closer to the essay format even though the writer is quite deliberately employing a number of the devices of the modern family chronicle. At the same time he appears to have shifted the angle of vision in comparison with similar earlier works: in vain would we look here for even a hint of the idyllic – quite the reverse in fact. In line with the essayistic quality of the work the author seeks to provide a documentary image of the way we once were, and includes a snapshot of the way we are now – at the very moment when the endless century has finally come to an end.

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Translation © David Short 2008

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