Authors
Vít KREMLIČKA
The poet, fiction writer and journalist Vít Kremlička was born in Prague on 22 October 1962. After graduating from a middle school for future teachers, he took a course in special education at Charles University in Brandýs nad Labem and then Czech and Comparative Literature at Prague, but finished neither. In the 1980s he was a member of music groups called ‘Národní třída’ and ‘His Boys’, and also helped to start up the arts and culture magazine Revolver Revue and the political weekly Respekt. Now a freelance writer, he lives in Prague.
Even in his collections of verse from the early 80s, published, after the Changes of late 1989, as Staré zpěvy (Old Hymns), Kremlička’s initial poetics, inspired by the diction of the weirdly rhyming total realist Egon Bondy, are cut through by a post-modern, multilayered vision of the world. This has changed his verse into a colourful kaleidoscope of snippets of reality and dreams, all milled together and shifting the character of the authorial text to an intricate intertextual collage. His initial compact rhymes dissolve into a wide range of associations, which spontaneously move between poetry and prose, permeated with quotations and paraphrases of other writers, accenting the basic vital needs of freedom and dialogue, which the Communist régime (under which Kremlička spent twenty-seven years) denied its citizens. The zenith of his literary efforts is Lodní deník (Ship’s Log), a work of prose fiction that accumulated over seven years and for which he was awarded the Orten Prize for young Czech writers in 1991. Kremlička’s verse from the first half of the 1990s, which is gathered together in Cizrna (Chickpea), no longer assumes the form of the intimate confession of a hypersensitive youth who, as he himself writes, ‘pushes his way through the tangle of half-bared figures (...), wipes the sweat and juices from his face, stumbles and groans: “Let me out! I want out!”’, but changes into an engagé, chiefly antimilitaristic, environmentally orientated literature. ‘What bugs you most today?’, he was asked in an interview by Petr Placák, one of his contemporaries. ‘The incessant wars’, Kremlička replied; ‘They stop in one place and start in another.’ It is fair to consider Kremlička’s large work of poetry-prose fiction Prozatím (For the Time Being) as a synthesis or herbarium of his poetic changes and motifs to date. Among the rhyming on the border of the absurd and the naive, sensitive natural lyric verse and literary anecdotes in the style of Daniil Kharms or Ivan Wernisch, language itself forcefully speaks out: Kremlička’s current writings are cautiously becoming rhythmic, a melodic, intrinsically imaginative, human gesture, which beneath a shell of flashy aestheticism continues to hide the bewitchingly beautiful, romantically aching soul of the sort of person Jack London once described as ‘the star-rover, the red-blooded adventurer, the vagabondish Cain of the centuries, the militant priest of remotest times, the moon-dreaming poet of ages forgotten and to-day unrecorded in man’s history of man!’
(rk)
E-mail: vitkremlicka@seznam.cz
Deutsch 
Vít KREMLIČKA, Deutsch.doc
