Authors
Pavel ŘEZNÍČEK
The fiction writer, poet, translator and journalist Pavel Řezníček was born in Blansko on 30 January 1942. After elementary and secondary school, he began a two-year course in librarianship, but did not complete it. Beginning in 1965 he made his living in a series of manual occupations (including milling-machine operator, warehouseman, archivist and bookbinder), and now works as a post-office clerk. He translates from the French (Joyce Mansour, Ambroise Vollard, Benjamin Péret and others). Since 1974 he has lived in Prague.
While doing his military service in Pilsen in 1961–63 Pavel Řezníček got to know the writer Petr Král, who awakened his interest in literature and especially Surrealism. He was to remain faithful to his ‘discovery’ of the Surrealist style while bringing new ideas to post-war Surrealism. In particular, he inclined to black humour and drew inspiration from the aesthetics of pataphysics. Řezníček started out as a poet, usually producing distinctive variants of poetic associative chains and what are known as ‘image-signals’; his natural gravitation to Surrealism in its post-1945 form was also reflected in his continuous creative debate with the tradition of bel canto in Czech literature. From the end of the 1960s, however, his poems were read only in Surrealist samizdat circles, and were to reach a wider audience only after the Changes of late 1989, twenty years after he wrote them (the anthologies Kráter Resnik a jiné básně [The Resnik Crater and Other Poems], Plovací sval [The Swimming Muscle], Tabákové vejce [Tobacco Eggs]). Surrealist inspiration and above all a pataphysical vision of the world have also had a major influence on Řezníček’s prolific works of fiction, in which he gives rein to his particularly droll imagination, initially in the lyric burlesque Zrcadlový pes (Mirror Dog). Gradually, however, he moved on to the creation of his own unique world of things and people, characterized chiefly by the pervasive presence of metaphor, often combined with the anthropomorphization of his distinctive semiotic universe. This direction was already marked out in Řezníček’s first work of fiction Alexandr v tramvaji (Alexander on the Tram) and acquired canonic features in Strop (Ceiling), the work of fiction that has won him the most critical acclaim. Strop consists of a sequence of grotesque scenes embodying a chaos of visions springing up from our subconscious and entering our consciousness. In other fictions Řezníček skilfully marries his black humour to the expressively lyrical pre-ordering of the structure of the work. The protagonist of the novel Vedro (Hot Weather), for example, is hot weather itself, not as a creature of flesh and blood, but nonetheless having a ‘normal’ human psychology. The Surrealist imagination also forms the axis of later works in which Řezníček continues to develop bizarre associative chains, playing inventive and hyperbolic variations on the archetypes of our consciousness (for example describing the grand wedding of the Pope and a masseuse) and emphasizing the conjoined parallelism of the external and internal worlds. Řezníček has produced a separate line of prose fiction in the form of grotesquely stylized ‘memories’ of the atmosphere in his circle, known as the Brno Literary Bohemians, in the 1960s and early 70s (Hvězdy kvelbu [Pub Stars], Popel žhne [Ash Glows], Blázny šatí stvol [Lunatics Dress a Leafless Stalk]), in which the levels of the fictional, the practical joke and something like the documentary freely coexist, and where (unusually for Řezníček) there are even notes of tender nostalgia and a humour that is surprisingly far from black.
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Pavel ŘEZNÍČEK
En français Pavel ŘEZNÍČEK
