Authors
Jiří KRATOCHVIL
Fiction writer, playwright, essayist and critic, Jiří Kratochvil was born in Brno on 4 January 1940. He took a degree in Czech and Russian Studies at Brno and later worked as a secondary-school teacher, librarian, archivist, crane-operator, hired hand, night-watchman, telephone operator, stoker, conservationist of historical monuments and editor in the Brno offices of Czech Radio. For his literature he has won the Tom Stoppard Prize (1991), the Czech Booksellers’ and Literární noviny prizes (both 1993), the Egon Hostovský Prize (1996), the Karel Čapek Prize (1998) and the Jaroslav Seifert Prize (1999). He is currently self-employed, and lives in Moravský Krumlov.
The familiar but apt saying about an author always writing one and the same book seems perfectly fitting for Jiří Kratochvil and his novels. To a certain extent, the author earned this reputation himself. In his literary debut, Medvědí román (Bear Novel; written in the mid-80s but not published till 1990) he establishes and thoroughly elaborates his poetics of a Modernist and ultimately Postmodernist narrative structure, initially inspired chiefly by the experimental literature of the 1960s. Most of his subsequent writing comprises original variations on this ‘never-ending story’, into which he incorporates his Postmodern philosophy of history as a static community affected by the entropy of history-making – and of both story-telling and not telling a story. Beginning with Medvědí román (later published in its original, comprehensive version as Urmedvěd [Ur-bear]), the artist was among the first in late twentieth-century Czech fiction systematically to employ the conception of the ‘novel as an open system’ relying on the principle of a narrative game. This should result in the reception of the proffered volume as unfinished, a piece of writing in the making, meeting the conventional requirements of a ‘work in progress’. Grotesque, fantastical and bizarre elements, sometimes resulting in tragicomic or tragically grotesque phenomena, play a key role in Kratochvil’s novels. Each of his works is an analysis of the possibilities of the formal construction of the epic, which exploits the principles of intertextuality to their maximum. In keeping with the many-layered style of his narration, Kratochvil is able to vary and transform the semiotic spaces of his stories spontaneously, and to insert motifs of the animal epic or experience of reincarnation. Occasionally, using literary quotation, he grafts on time-honoured approaches from contemporary Western fiction (including Czech writers, such as Ivan Vyskočil or the Paris-based Milan Kundera) and from ‘pulp’ or popular literary production. Kratochvil is also noted for his essays on literature, which he approaches with the Postmodernist creed, meditating on the pleasure found in the traditional Lust zum Fabulieren, as in Příběhy příběhů (Stories of Stories), Vyznání příběhovosti (A Declaration of Love to/from Story-telling), and a whole string of plays, mainly for radio, including Slepecká cvičení (Exercises for the Blind), A babička slaví devětadevadesáté narozeniny (And Granny Turns 99). Apart from this central Postmodernist line, his fiction also includes works in which he prefers a more traditional form of writing, focusing mainly on memories or retrospective commentaries on the author’s childhood and youth. Nonetheless, even here Kratochvil does not conceal Postmodernist or experimental impulses. In his retrospective novel Avion (Aeroplane) he draws his inspiration from the interwar avant-garde architecture of Brno, again making an image of the world as a labyrinth, constructed with many allusions to the classics as well as Modernist and Postmodernist writers.
(vn)
Deutsch 
Jiří KRATOCHVÍL, Deutsch.doc
En français Jiří KRATOCHVÍL, En français.doc
