Authors

It would be a mistake to characterize Bohumil Nuska as a writer whose work takes death as some kind of a symbol for the destruction of life and its meddling transience, as can be found in innumerable volumes of poetry and prose, not least those of the romantics, the symbolists and - even more so - the decadents. As Nuska himself says: "I do not suffer in the least from thanatophilia - a predilection for the phenomenon of death - and less still from necrophilia - that is to say, a pathetic partiality for corpses." What Nuska's books do show us is the fatal enchantment of the iconographic representation of death, which finds expression in the late-Gothic engravings of Albrecht Duerer, in the Renaissance acrobatics of the woodcuts of Hans Holbein, and - wildly caricatured - in the late-19th/early-20th century in the drawings of Mexico's José Guadalupe Posada. We can go on to name Death Drifts Past from Erben's Wedding Shirts, the pictures of Felix Jenewein, the works of Josef Váchal and Ladislav Klíma, Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal, and the contemporary work of Jiří H. Krchovský and Viktorie Rybáková. And it is out of this imaginary dance of death (in Old German Totentanz, in French danse macabre), this whirl of skeletons with clattering jaws and rattling, faded bones that the writer draws the fictitious world of his character Mrs Almighty, who appears in manifold forms - for example, as a beautiful girl woven from a nebula, or as a wrinkly old woman with clenched lips. In some stories a soothing, solicitous mother stands in for Death, in others a sensuous lover. The personification of this abstract can be empathetic and cruel, cynical and tenderly compassionate - although it never wavers in its principal and ultimate task, i.e. to accompany the chosen one to the underworld of Hades, beyond the river Styx. Bohumil Nuska first treated the theme of the "godmother of death", "the Great Unevitable" or "Mrs All-ruling" almost half a century ago. In the story The Knight and Death, written in 1958 and included in his debut collection Looking for the Knot (1967), we recognize the prinicipal motifs which will serve as the pillars upon which Nuska will build his oeuvre. A knight on horseback enters the scene; he is suffering from physical fatigue, but still he is the very essence of the morals of the age, a man of firm principles and strict manners. A friendly Death approaches him, reveals herself to him and then disappears - having gathered the knight to her by means of an embrace and a love-drenched kiss. Even in this very work, we have a sense of the contradictory emotions at play between the principles of masculine and feminine; we glimpse the dance by which Death - which with Nuska is always female - pursues Life (male). This dance is strange and wonderful, has something in it of the sadistic and the masochistic, and it plays out the opposition of the will to live and the impossibility of resisting the allure of death. In this heroic yet pathetic ambivalence, this terrifying parody of the games of love, in amor mortis, as the author describes it, we become aware of the birth a third important figure in Nuska's prose. This is the clown, a character crude and profane, a joker whose conjuring tricks and witticisms provide relief and context, thus placing on imaginary scales the knight's respectability, his metaphysical statuesqueness, and his sense of proportion and order. At this point the gluttonous Dionysus - underworld god of ecstasy and emotion - reveals himself, as does a martyr (an antipode to the Apollonianism of the knight). In The Knight and Death, Nuska provides a foretaste of the qualities which make his later work so difficult to classify or pin down. Already the lines are blurred between art and scholarship, between literature, memoir and essay; already we see the interplay of a more subjective voice and a more contrived third-person narration: Nuska has anticipated the aesthetic preferences of the postmodernists. In the slim volume Dance of Death (2002) - comprising eight stories which, with one exception, were written between the mid 1980s and 2001 - we encounter another prime mover of Nuska's fiction. "My inspiration was the deaths of certain friends," the author says of this collection, in which the figures of poet Andrej Stankovič, critic Jan Lopatka, and philosopher Jiří Němec drift through a series of realistic and ghostly scenes. Over the narrative mix of real memory, fantastical imagery and private contemplation is superimposed impersonal testimony. In Dance of Death, Nuska's poetic vigil is accompanied by the author's so-called "automatic drawings", which "emerge half-formed, always drawn with a graphite pencil on the paper which is to hand - with practically no control, as if they were drawing themselves ... [although] the creation of an automatic drawing is always inspired by a particular motif or it emerges from a given backdrop. This could be a real story, an event or an experience, a source of contemplation, music heard, a work of art seen, etc." The automatic drawing as an equivalent part of the text (which has little in common with the automatism of the surrealists in terms of its technique and purpose) is - in the light of efforts to syncretize genres - the second defining characteristic of the author's creative work. The third concerns its intertextuality and repeated references to the author's favourite works of art and writing: the emblems Nuska sees in Duerer's engraving Knight, Death and the Devil, Holbein's Dance of Death, Klíma's Glorious Nemesis, the traditional folk representation of death as a hairy old woman, and quotations from his own works. Bohumil Nuska brings to his role of writer the experience, knowledge and sensibilities of the art historian, doctor of philosophy and scholar of aesthetics. He manages with ease to move between poetry of more philosophical content (vide Moments, 1998) and the literary-historical study (vide A Swinging Affair and Kakfa's Trial, 1969), as he does between lyrical prose or the lightly lyrical landscape (vide Bird Valley or the Idyll, 2004) and the opulent stream-of-consciousness novel a la Joyce's Ulysses - for which see his Padraig's Fall (1997), which in his afterword to Dance of Death, Milan Exner (aka Jindřich Němeček) characterizes as "an expressive allegory of the disintegration of an age and the personalities it holds within, its setting reminiscent of the Ireland of Borovský's King Lávra, that is to say the Czechoslovakia of Normalization". Each of these attitudes come together, albeit to differing extents, in what is thus far the author's magnum opus, the imposingly wide-ranging septet of stories entitled Mrs Almighty (2005), which Nuska shyly presents to the reader as a "mere product of his thoughts on various possibilities" and "contemplative stimuli". Although at certain points these products and stimuli might seem excessive in their description and as such rather static, this work is full of movement; its shifting sands start out from the fairy tale, out of a gracious imagination where the medieval meets the modern (late Gothic, early Renaissance). In more exact terms of space and time, passages succeed which - with their sequences of dialogue, dramatic advances in plot, the inevitable and self-evident climax - hark back to the historical realism of the nineteenth century. In the opening tale the idyllic, honey-sweet scene of a royal court changes by a single blow into a spectacle to delight the sadist - a bloodbath in which drowns a court fool who is unhappily in love with a princess. Elsewhere, a knight's long pilgrimage over a vast, Mácha-style landscape of mountains, plains and dark, deep forests, overlaps with a vain battle with phantoms, a dance in which Love promises itself to Death, Eros embraces Thanatos. Then there is the peaceful life of a village where the passing hours are marked by the ringing of an old-time wooden bell, a life which is shattered by fire and immediately thereafter the self-sacrifice of the bell-ringer - a common clown and melancholic drunk whose journey through the wall of fire to the far bank nevertheless achieves a spiritual catharsis both imaginary and real. Nuska's writings flow to the order of linearity and chronology. As in real life, it is clear to us from his first words that "everyone bears from birth my mark on his forehead - the mark of Death". The stories of Mrs Almighty are in tune with Sartre's idea of existence, as something into which the ultimate human essence is knitted - a need, indeed an imperative, which the wearying hero ("a man solemn and brave") of the story The Knight's Choice expresses in a sentence addressed to the cynical grimace of a personalized end: "I shall choke you to death, though it may cost me my life!" The paradox and bitter ridicule implicit to this utterance are of course only virtual: the knight refuses to relinquish his honour without a fight, though he sees clearly that Death is playing with him a cruel game for her own amusement, taunting him to surrender his pride and capitulate. His fight is reminiscent of Don Quixote's encounter with the wooden vanes of the windmill, but here in the face of Death, Man is the ultimate victor, having vindicated his essence. And this is the basic message of Nuska's writing. All his ironical digressions into the histories of various trades and folk arts, his etymological excursions to the origins of language, his popular-historical inserts on all kinds of topics, indeed even his educational stance on the perils of alcohol - each of these "lightly instructive" elements is simply a non-binding expression of the author's joy, consolation and private pleasure in the text en route to his point. And this point has but a single expression: respice finem (consider the end).

(rk)

Deutsch Bohumil NUSKA, Deutsch.doc