Authors

Matoušek has been writing for 25 years, but many of his works remained long in manuscript or enjoyed limited circulation in samizdat. He began with verse, producing expressive, meditative and litany-like compositions (in the collection Poezie) but he soon shifted his focus to prose. His first collections of short stories, Mezi obrazy (Among Pictures; later published as Mezi starými obrazy [Among Old Pictures]) and Album, testified eloquently to Matoušek’s disposition as a writer given to introspection, fascinated by details and snippets of everyday life, but also inclined to symbolizing his message, to philosophizing in arcs that curve over the linear narrative plane. This is already manifest in his first novel, Nové lázně (New Spas), an original type of anti-Utopia that takes place not in an environment of staggering technical inventions, but amid the sensitive tissue of human relations that in future ages will invariably be affected by archetypal patterns of thought and action and will therefore permanently incline to violence and manipulation, while at the same time concretizing the sensitivity of the soul. In the context of Czech literature for children and young people the author’s Autobus a Andromeda (The Bus and Andromeda) also merits recognition. The reader is taken on an excursion to visit the mystical and mysterious of this world, but within Matoušek’s Ōuvre it is an excursus in which he demonstrated his skill with stylistic empathy. The appearance of his vast novel Ego was a major event in Czech literature. He had worked on it for years and in it sought to capture, in the manner of X-rays, the ‘sentimental education’ of the generation that entered social life at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. This story of a young man also includes his ethical and aesthetic maturation, his brushes with evil and how he grapples with it, but above all we share in his gradual discovery of the external world and self-discovery of his inner world. It is at decisive moments in this process of discovering the universe and the narrator’s individuality that the dramatic nerve of this confessional, stock-taking reflexive prose is concealed. Scrutiny of the regularities of existence, here accompanied by a constant longing for spiritual illumination, subsequently becomes, in Ego, a blissful act of enlightenment and self-enlightenment: in this way the human ego is moulded with maximum plasticity and through such acts it acquires its predetermined form. The second of Matoušek’s major novels is Spas (Saviour). Despite again looking like an ‘authentic’ record of one private life and one individual’s search, this story is played out in an age described by the writer as millenarian. The protagonists are all visionaries and dreamers, levitating in the maelstroms of time and space, while abiding and persevering within their own or someone else’s vicious circles. The point of their semi-dreamlike existence is something that can barely be fulfilled, bordering on the impossible, often incomprehensible and ineffable. Matoušek’s characters circulate in a constant state of apparently relaxed or, conversely, agitated fervour, giving themselves up to this persistent rapture at least in their innermost selves, in visions, though from a superficially rationalist point of view their ideas might be described as foolish, if not downright preposterous, crazy. The millenarianism of the world of Matoušek’s novels shows, in Spas, the airy, heretical confusion of the emotional and reflexive in man, a confusion frequently identified with the post-modern condition in life and literature. Here, its bizarre and burlesque plurality becomes the demonstrable common denominator of, or a unique kind of a basis – unbounded by time or space – for, the entire infinite, de facto unending narrative, which postulates the multidimensional infinity of our world and tends towards a cosmic vision of human society. A vision that is then, again, conspicuously infinite and even more conspicuously inexpressible.

(vn)

Deutsch Ivan MATOUŠEK, Deutsch.doc

En français Ivan MATOUŠEK, En français.doc