Authors

Josef Kroutvor is an author who creates his literary, but above all his inner, world out of the fragments and torsos of ancient and modern architectures and urban labyrinths, echoes of the art of the past and present (Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Josef Váchal, Jiří Sopko), and the echoes and whispers that undulate above the café tables of Prague, Vienna, Paris or Venice. He is one of the last representatives of a waning Central-Europeanism. He is a melancholy pilgrim traversing the outer edges and lost enclaves of our world, but also an adherent of the grotesque view of the world and a legitimate heir of Kafka’s Josef K. His numerous works mirror the snare into which modern man is lured. It is a kind of cage or trap of an eternally renewed dandyism, poetry of a life without poetry, an aimless roaming among the records and relics of the belle époque. In Dandy a manekýna (The Dandy and the Mannequin) the fragmentary, ironic and grotesque quality of the modern world is put under the microscope of a sceptic who knows that the one-time beauty of Art Nouveau was transformed under the impetus of the avant-gardes of the twentieth century into moving spectres and dream scenes. A world like Baudelaire’s hashish-induced ‘golden cage’, a Byronesque dandyism, a twilight melancholy that ‘has the aesthetic qualities of an aria from an Italian opera and of sweet death’, a gradual transition from the aristocratic dandyism of a Don Juan to the vacuity and sterility of male and female human mannequins, mechanized beings no longer heroically comical, but merely bleakly trivial – such is the raison d’źtre of this Wildean phenomenon. In Města a ostrovy (Cities and Islands) Kroutvor returns to, among others, Paris in order to contrast an image of what was once an artists’ paradise with its modern hectic and hedonistic aspect, which has finally ceased erupting into avant-gardism and now lives as an ever-changing, but also rather sad graveyard of the arts. Kroutvor’s portraits of European cities, from Scandinavia through London to Rome and Venice show the urban element as a cultural island, disappearing in the ocean of an anonymous landscape, in the last remnant of a wilderness that grows tame on the frontier between nature and artifice. Yet Kroutvor’s musings on the survival of European civilization are not the act of a late Romantic, but the thoughts of an intellectual experiencing a kind of horror vacui arising from the turbulent elements which classical antiquity knew how to invoke, but also tame. In the philosophical essays that make up Živly (Elements) the author appeals to this taming of the mythical conception of the nature of human existence in the spirit of Empedocles, who saw elementality as a manifestation of the gods’ eagerness, but also their infantilism, to which only the human intellect brought a hint of order and a coming to terms with the darkness of archetypes. Not only in the Živly essays, but in other Kroutvor works too, the reader is faced with the split personality of a man who searches out shadows in order to illuminate them with the light of other shadows in the form of cultural stereotypes, nostalgic moods and all that is born and dies above the shiny, deceptive mirrors of coffee-house tables. Cafés, taverns, galleries, new and second-hand bookshops, these are Kroutvor’s loci fatales, fatal spaces, above and below ground, in which the last residues of a spiritual life of Renaissance opulence are concentrated. Café fatal is his homage to the coffee houses of Europe, whose dark corners are still haunted by the forgotten poets of existence, idlers and their phantoms. The voluminous compilation Fernety (Shots of Fernet [bitters]) contains the bulk of Kroutvor’s verse from the 1970s to 1990s. In the poem ‘Fernet’ Kroutvor conveys the essence of the Czech offshoot of Decadent dandyism, also sketching a self-portrait: “A dark-haired man about town with a narrow moustache / Šviháček too / The absinthe of bohemian Prague / Coffin varnish / An anti-vampire cure / The hemlock of dissidents / From the Malá Strana Café / The melancholia of dusk / The favourite drink of Czech poets / After 1968 / Like hot grog: / A leap into the dark…” Besides its lyrical miniatures and episodes Fernety contains the collection Pražský chodec (A Prague Pedestrian), about a Kafkaesque world uncircumscribed by time and its imprint on the present. Kroutvor’s domain is the essay, seen as an ‘adventure of the spirit’, a literary form at a crossroads of genres and modes of expression. The essay collection Praha město ostrých hran (Prague, City of Sharp Edges) and the essay Benátky (Venice) are a peculiar mixture of sounds, strains and melodies, shouting and silence, eternal and transient images, things that shed their purpose and are consigned to a latter-day version of the rococo panopticon and freak show of eccentrics, poets and unfortunates.

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Deutsch Josef KROUTVOR, Deutsch.doc

En français Josef KROUTVOR, En français.doc