Poet, literary critic, historian and university teacher, Vladimír Křivánek was born to the family of a clerical worker on 7 May 1951 in the Czech town, Kolín. After graduating from secondary school, he worked briefly as an assistant in a second-hand bookstore. From 1969 to 1974, he studied Czech and History at the Faculty of Education, Charles University, Prague. 1974 to 1976, he taught as a primary school teacher in Kladno. From 1977, he worked in the Institute of Czech and World Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Prague, first as a bibliographer then as an assistant in the section for the history of Czech literature. He received a PhD. degree in philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, where he successfully defended his thesis To the Problem of Historicism in Pre-March Czech Literature. Later he specialized in Romanticism and the life and work of Czech poet and prose writer Karel Hynek Mácha. In the 1980s, Křivánek published books on Jan Neruda (1983) and Karel Hy
In his postscript to Křivánek's even-handed work A Still Life with Last Year's Nuts (Zátiší s loňskými ořechy), Jiří Opelík writes that this lyrical poet entered Czech poetry in between certain stages – the 1960s generation of poets had been shattered by the upcoming "normalization" of the post-1968 Czechoslovakia and a lot of its members had chosen to live in an exile. Also, a new poetic movement, escaping the darkness of a totalitarian regime, could not be formed with some writers (including Křivánek) earlier than the 1980s. Moreover, it would only fully develop in the lyrical explosion of the 1990s. By then, Křivánek had already been an established author. He published his first books in the 1980s and therefore could not radically cut himself off – for example by forming a new poetics - from the continually in process and cultural tradition of his own poetry. This poetry had always stood outside generations and movements and existed in the vacuum of solitude. The solitary quality and uniqueness of Křivánek's poetry is strengthened by the fact that he has always made a distinction between himself as a poet (so far he has published seven collections of poetry) and as a literary historian and critic or teacher. However, his skills as a literary historian and scholar in the field of Czech literature and as a good editor (Křivánek edited several volumes of poetry by Kamil Bednář, František Gellner and Vladimír Holan), as well as his critical skills (which were manifested as early as his first essay The Romantic Concept of Karel Hynek Mácha's works and the works of Mikhail Lermontov, published in 1974) have always influenced his lyrical poetry.
From the first , Křivánek's poetry has tended towards meditation, inwardness, introspection about love affairs and partnerships and sometimes even towards philosophical or commonplace reflections on nature which might remind us of poets such as Josef Hora, Vladimír Holan and, most importantly, Jan Skácel. Křivánek has studied and edited Holan's work and is about to finish an extensive book on Holan's work, The Night with Hamlet, which could become, after Opelík's recently published essay, the first full portrait of this modern, neo-baroque poet, philosopher and mystic. Skácel is for Křivánek a source of inspiration based on the earthy, elemental, dramatic quality of his poetry which is full of outbursts of ardent love and passion untamed by civilization and the disguise of its rationality.
In his first two collections of poetry Setting Free the Dove (Vypouštění holubice) and Naked Trees (Nahé stromy), which are both set in a world of almost hermetically sealed solitude, Křivánek expressed a common voice for the times full of allegory and secrets. But from his third book The Stones of Songs (Kameny písní) to the present full of his lyrical texts, he has strictly stayed away from the problems of the world around him and followed the imperative of the timeless questions of metaphysics. His techniques include silence, concentration, meditation and inner reflections but also lyrical tools and finesse. However, some critics might accuse Křivánek of being archaic, sometimes even seeing reality in a starry-eyed way full of pathos.
Křivánek is a poet of desire, passion, love and dreaming, but also of the opposite: pain, doubt and scepticism. Therefore, his metaphors often end up dissipated into indeterminacy. It is only natural that a love affair and existentialist dialogue between the man and the woman climaxes in a catharsis whose outcome is – again – solitude.
Apart from these sceptical, sometimes even nihilistic metaphors ending in negative catharsis, a logical consequence of this orphic wandering within the realm of solitude is a tendency towards a poetic precision, often of an almost esoteric nature. Metaphorically speaking, the structure of the poem changes into a torso which is then destructed to a heap of relics and stones that remind us of the primeval nature of rock. From this rock, form and life are created.
From Křivánek's third book The Stones of Songs to The Testaments (Testamenty) to A Landscape with Torsos (Krajina s torzy) to Ink Drawings (Tušové kresby), the overwhelming impression of Křivánek's poetry is an ephemeral elusiveness that appears reluctantly in the networks and spider webs of the verse; an elusiveness about what is hidden behind the image and manifested in parts but not in the whole. In The Testaments, the poet still tries to picture a world inspired by Antiquity through a rigid form of four verse stanzas. In A Landscape with Torsos and Ink Drawings, this develops into a gentle dialogue and sometimes even a monologue with the departing love only for a moment dragged from the hands of eternity, with a touch of emptiness and a soundless realm without passion or sensuality.
Křivánek's lyrical poetry may be archaic, starry-eyed, full of nostalgia and oriented to the past rather than the present. Its tone may be melancholic and somewhat misted over, with no demonstration of spirit and action. It may even be more of a dialogue with the solitude of the soul rather than with the world around. Despite all this, it appears to manifest not only humility but also the courage to look into the eyes of a world that has lost the magic and vertigo of the moment. This moment now only appears as an echo, a flash of consciousness that flares with memory. Vladimír Křivánek is a poet for those balanced, quiet people whose destiny is to cool the waves of feeling and passion with what Křivánek calls "opaque light" or a "face woven from spider webs".
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This portrait updated as of 1 January 2008
