Authors

It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Procházková’s development as a writer occurred entirely within the independent, free-thinking Czech literature that was characteristic of Czech cultural and political dissent. It was not by accident that she could only publish in samizdat form or in exile. However, with the exception of some later works, she did not focus her attention on political or social problems (these only form a background to her stories). For many years she concentrated on one predominant narrative model, that of psychological fiction, where the central heroine’s world (often over a long period of development) comes into conflict with the world of men, the historical milieu she inhabits, and chiefly the norms of behaviour and interaction which contribute to the heroine’s emotional development, sometimes in a positive manner, though more often than not having a very negative influence on her individual moral code. For her characters (especially the female ones) there is a characteristic, marked desire for freedom of thought, which Procházková very subtly shows in a number of expressive situations, which are enhanced more by a distinctive linguistic style than by the actual plot. This was how Lenka Procházková set about constructing her first stories as well as her novels from the end of the 1970s and 1980s, which mainly present a series of distinctive episodes, and are more a chain of events and diverse “living pictures” than an attempt at an epic representation of time and space. She became known in independent literary circles through one of her early novels, Růžová dáma [The Pink Lady] (for which she was awarded the prestigious Egon Hostovský Prize for exiles), which analyses the problems of love and partnership within relationships. Its peripatetic and harrowing scenes are explored in several of the author’s other works, of which Smolná kniha [The Luckless Book] is the best example. Of all of her novels to date it is in these love stories that figures from Czech society come to the foreground, the most significant being Czech dissidents Václav Havel and Ludvík Vaculík. By getting her heroine involved with an older writer-dissident, she shows opposing values to those in Ludvík Vaculík’s book Jak se dělá chlapec [How To Make A Boy]. In 1988 the publishers Petlice brought out in samizdat form Procházková’s book on the life of Jan Palach, which she co-wrote with Jiří Lederer. Even though since 1989 her earlier works could be freely published, she herself has been undergoing significant artistic changes and in her texts she is evidently searching for a new style of genre whereby she can break the definite thematic and stylistic “magic spell” of her older prose, which on the one hand presents an individual account, while on the other acts as a series of variations on a theme, which somewhat monotonously go over the same subjects (eg in the series of stories Zvrhlé dny [Degenerate Days] ). At the same time, since the 1990s she has become more active in addressing immediate problems in society through her journalism (eg Věc: Marta Chadimová [The Marta Chadimová Case] ), or with a more direct form of journalism in her “intimate” family correspondence Dopisy z Bamberku [Letters from Bamberk]. In Šťastné úmrtí Petra Zacha [The Happy Death of Petr Zach] (a gentle satire on the theme of the “Velvet Revolution”) for the critic there seems to be a lack not only of psychological, but also of tragic-absurd moments. There is a move towards the problems of politics and society in the historical work Pan ministr [Minister], which looks at the life of First Republic politician Jan Masaryk. Further evidence of the author’s search for new themes and genres can be seen in her last novel Beránek [The Lamb]. In this work, for the first time, Lenka Procházková attempts an expansive, epic form, which explores Biblical motifs and, within the context of Jesus’s Apocrypha, moves towards the genre of a time-transcending novel, while in the second stage of the narrative there is a comparison of New Testament ethical problems from the past with the diverse, urgent moral problems connected with the present.

(vn)

This profile was last updated on January 1st 2007

Deutsch Lenka PROCHÁZKOVÁ, Deutsch.doc