Authors

In the context of the Czech prose fiction of the 1980s and ’90s Petr Placák long had the reputation of being a ‘one-book author’, the book being the fictional documentary Medorek, which was initially read in underground circles and was in its day a big event in Czech samizdat literature. In Medorek he managed to create a vertical and horizontal three-dimensional picture of Czech society before the Changes of November and December 1989, projected primarily onto the model story, though still psychologically credible, of its young hero. Placák brings a deliberate irony, bordering on parody, to his portrayal of the hero’s family relations, contacts with kindred spirits, conditions at work, and continual surveillance by the authorities (especially the secret police) as a non-conformist individual consigned to the periphery of society. The axis of the narrative is the hero’s search for an alternative life that would allow him to come to terms with both his own shortcomings and the aggressive totalitarian system that skilfully exploits human infirmities and weaknesses. The same gravitation towards moral judgement and protest against the evil and baseness of the social system also characterizes an early, lyrical work of his fiction, Obrovský zasněžený hřbitov (The Huge Snow-covered Cemetery), where in the underground spirit he confronts his own humiliation by the reality of the times and the agencies of the establishment, setting against it the ideal of an independent life influenced by Romanticism and the horizons of a longed for inner freedom. It was precisely to these ideas and postulates that Placák returned many years later in Cestou za dobrodružstvím (On the Road to Adventure), a collection of his short stories previously published in magazines (in samizdat the 1980s and then in regular periodicals in the 1990s). Here he deliberately combines his search for vital, ‘authentic’, pre-November 1989 experience with his similar exploratory expeditions after the Velvet Revolution. At the same time, by the mere fact of projecting comparable reflections into comparably ‘authentic’ but more purposive narrative form, Placák the narrator has been putting pressure on himself to derive some new, more urgent message from his experience of travelling. In this book the principle of ‘on-the-road’ freedom is imperceptibly fading, losing the intellectual ground on which it rests. Wanderlust and the sense of great freedom remain, but are not enough, since surely they must lead to some higher journey of the soul. And so, adventure gradually ceases to be a value in itself, becoming more an excuse for a covert, internal exploration, or at least a spur to the perception that such exploration will come sooner or later, and will ultimately give a timeless, unerring meaning to the author’s journeys in search of adventure. As a marginal note we should add that Placák has collected his magazine interviews with sixteen poets of the Czech underground of the 1970s and 1980s, and published them under the title Kádrový dotazník (Background Questionnaire), and that he has published his university dissertation entitled Svatováclavské milénium: Češi, Němci a Slováci v roce 1929 (The St Wenceslas Millennium: Czechs, Germans and Slovaks in 1929).

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Deutsch Petr PLACÁK, Deutsch.doc

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