Authors

Jiří H. Krchovský emerged from the Prague underground as a unique, nonconformist phenomenon in contemporary Czech poetry, with a style that has remained unchanged since he began: it is the poetry of gravestone epitaphs, half-broken, faded mirrors and torn shrouds, the sheen of coffins, and sunken graves. He is a reminder of the long-forgotten Dandyism that sometimes returns to the superficial contemporary world; he is also the son of damnation and disdain, of solitude tied to the vanishing Decadent world of the moving peripheries of society, of souls breaking free from the amoebic quality of angels fallen to Earth. Black mysticism and desacralized eroticism imbue his poetry with something like Brecht’s alienation. Krchovský is a lyricist of raw, cogent proclamations, of original, if at times overly artificial stylization that conceals the face of the eternal anxiety of man as though behind a mask. Under the frenzied gestures of the Decadent and blasphemer’s cries shouted into the drunken darkness of daybreak, the human fear of empty existence lies buried like a fragment of feeble salvation, like that of Narcissus, entirely absorbed in his own being. In the words of Rilke, the borders of Krchovský’s poetry likewise ‘Gush into tarns and meadows, / And reach them as soon as they rise’. From the root of his murky, suffocating verse grows a water-lily tendril bearing the dreamily sad flower of the poet’s face. Melancholy, at times drowned out by indifference, ennui, satyric irony, contempt, and the omnipotent aloofness of one banished from humanity, constitutes the foundation stone of Krchovský’s lyric verse, pure and boyishly poignant at its core. His creative output confirms that in poetry radical stylization can indeed go hand in hand with trivialization, both intentional and accidental, and with pseudo-folkloric verse. In the latter, Krchovský follows the time-honoured recipes of Josef Váchal and Ladislav Klíma from the easily attainable to the utterly inaccessible, from a familiar shore to distant preludes of island paradises that we, entirely absorbed with ourselves, turn into prisons. In Noci, po nichž nepřichází ráno (Nights Not Followed by Day), his first, short collection of verse, he is a lyricist of ornamental interiors, dark chambers, rooms that are at once open yet enclosed on all sides, filled with astral beings ‘without arms or legs / Bodiless, headless figures / With nothing except a soul / Nothing except a soul….’ Here Krchovský is also the sombre poet of graveyards that are silent gardens into which human laughter and passion steal with the restlessness of love and tranquillity of solitude. Some of his lyrical figures recall the Surrealist doctrine. They are an amplified dream, a dream amidst dreaminess, and they are also a painful awakening. In this collection, the author suggests that the melodic principle, even with its futile Orphism, has not been lost in modern poetry. As a counterpart to this musical line, the poet constructs his ideology of permanent self-torment, of the masochism of the lyrical ego on ‘the morning after’, facing the day ‘with some of his own skin under his nails’. Against the particular and symbolic character of his earliest lyric cycles, which is present in the titles to its individual sections, the volume Leda s labutí (Leda and the Swan) signals a broader, more abstract character. From a wanderer in remote regions, which one normally does not enter with impunity, Krchovský transforms into a moving force, who ‘desires another moment’, while clinging to ‘all that is as it used to be’. Instead of its former austerity, his verse from this period begins to spread out and become agitated. The rigid mirror transforms into a rippled surface, stirred to movement by the cast stone of our being. The tip of a mythical moon sheds light on this Decadent backdrop of the world, endowing it with a sacral atmosphere and biblical patina, naive, almost like a work by Giotto: ‘Just me and my shadow … / The last pair in the ark. / The gramophone plays funeral marches / There’s no sign of the shore or hills not to mention cities. / The Last Supper (with one item on the menu): / Dove’s breasts, a sprig on the side / Elegant atmosphere, unearthly prices’. Beginning in the 1980s, Krchovský’s poetry took on a strongly epic form and dramatic quality. In the confrontation between action and mobility, the inconstancy of the outside world and the numbness of man frozen in a shadow, man become puppet, corpse, monster, man turned into his own reproachful demon, we begin to catch the echo of the Decadence of František Gellner, Karel Hlaváček or Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic: ‘My sweetheart rests, her belly naked / And my palms rest in hers… / Only her heart beats through the silence / And she doesn’t know that she’s making love to a monk / She knows nothing as she offers her embrace / As the sighs pour forth from her lips / And it is drizzling quietly outside, / That she is making love to a carcass / That she is kissing the lips of a corpse.’ The Decadent echoes of Krchovský’s verse are not chiefly imitative. They are permeated with the hardened, insensitive expressionism of an uncaring world. His poetry is more reminiscent of the ‘dissecting room’ of Gottfried Benn than of Georg Trakl’s makeshift chapel for the dead with the pale-blue of daybreak in its windows. Regardless of how much certain critics may find it eclectic (and the reader can experience its full range in the volume Básně [Poems]) or calculated, Krchovský’s verse faithfully portrays the existential anxiety that has long made its way into both our waking lives and our dreams.

(js)

Deutsch Jiří H. KRCHOVSKÝ, Deutsch.doc

En français Jiří H. KRCHOVSKÝ, En français.doc

E marwin@inmail.cz 

http://krchovsky.wz.cz/ + Facebook (fan-group)