Authors

The name Jan Antonín Pitínský (which the author started to use in 1985) is now synonymous with modern Czech theatre and drama production. One side of his activities consists of direct work for theatre. For example, Pitínský has dramatized and then often directed various works of literature, he organized street-theatre events in the 1980s, and he creates experimental theatrical pieces that he calls ‘ballet libretto’, ‘stage montage’ or ‘stage oratorio’. The other side of his work is as a dramatist in the more traditional sense. Pitínský is a pioneer of what is known as alternative theatre and has done much to create its repertoire, which has affinities to the repertoire of small theatre companies but is distinctive for its greater leanings to Postmodern poetics. His first plays, especially Ananas (Pineapple) and Matka (Mother), successfully introduced this style into a Czech context, specifically the non-conformist environment of independent or independently orientated theatre companies. Ananas is based on the method of associative montage, dominated by the principle of allusion, quotation or parodic paraphrase. Matka, on the other hand, which was regarded as the great event of Czech alternative theatre in the 1980s, involved the grotesque transformation of the Socialist-Realist and generally pseudo-Realist drama of the post-war period. Its main dynamic was the principle of deformation of individual statements to create a dramatic idiom that ridiculed ad absurdum the phraseology of the period, whether social jargon or outright political officialese. At the turn of the 1980s/90s Pitínský took up a new theme reflected in several plays. This is the theme of the social outsider, the individual afflicted by the complex of being uprooted, the loss of home, and trauma springing from latent existential insecurity. In the dramas of Pitínský all this deepens the tragic sense of life, and states of depression arising from warped family and private relations. The drama critic Kamila Černá has fittingly described his play Park as a ‘parable of humility, guilt and redemption’. Similar motifs inform Pitínský’s next two plays, Pokojíček (A Little Room) and Buldočina aneb Nakopnutá kára (Bulldoggery or: The Kick-Started Jalloby). His fiction, important despite its modest size and confinement to the beginning of the 1990s, remains in the shadow of his plays and especially his directorial creations. The novella Praha: Intimní deník hrdiny (Prague: The Intimate Diary of a Hero), for example, is an experimental type of stylized memoir, describing artistic impressions of his ‘wanderings’ through both the allusions and the concrete realities of the city. The autobiographical basis is even more marked in his retrospective work Wolker a Bezruč (Wolker and Bezruč), subtitled Kronika roku 1985 (Chronicle of the Year 1985), which Pitínský himself calls a ‘novel-diary’ and into which he projects the dreamy visions of a Brno librarian, a character in which we can see the author’s alter ego. Not until the beginning of the third millennium did Pitínský present himself as a poet, publishing a collection of older and new poems entitled Lulku tatíčkovi (A Pipe for Daddy). Dominated by parody and burlesque, and with affinities to linguistic slapstick and nonsense poetry, the collection forms a natural complement to his experiments in drama and prose fiction. Among his other literary activities it is worth mentioning his editorship of a collection of poems entitled Uprostřed průmyslové noci: Antologie mladé jihomoravské poezie (In the Middle of the Industrial Night: An Anthology of Young South Moravian Poetry), which reflects his understanding of modern and Postmodern trends in Czech poetry at the turn of the century.

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Deutsch Jan Antonín PITÍNSKÝ, Deutsch.doc

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