Authors

Sylvie Richterová’s literary output began to circulate at the end of the 1970s in samizdat and then exile editions. It was not until the 1990s that the author was officially published in her own country. Although her books do not belong to a specific time period, it is worth bearing in mind this late publication. The first of the author’s three prose works, later making up the collection Slabikář otcovského jazyka [A Primer of the Father Tongue], is a memoir of times gone by (as far back as early childhood) and a search for the meaning of life through text. The author wants to “express herself”, “articulate herself”, so that through language she can arrive at self-knowledge. It is insufficient to record that such and such a thing happened in such a way, rather she attempts to penetrate to what happens “behind” simple events. She follows the inner tension of a memory to the earliest experience, to the causes and effects reaching behind the horizon of one life. She inventively expands upon several of the ideas of Vera Linhartová, whose work she took a theoretical interest in. However, with Sylvie Richterová, any return to the roots inevitably leads to an examination of the present. The writer’s first three novels are similar in structure to journal entries (albeit heavily stylised), which are characteristically fragmented and display a lack of trust in the illusion of storytelling. In this phase of creation both the construction of a fictional plot and a typical linear narrative technique do not interest Richterová. The author wants to find out how memories are stored in our consciousness. She does not follows real time, but a personal time “which extends both outwards and backwards.” Even though it is private in character, this “trilogy” is also a general reflection on the human condition: “The question which is formed on every page can be summed up in one sentence: Where do people and objects belong?” Like a leitmotif running through the author’s work we have a literary reflection that on one hand doubts the value of writing, while at the same time notes “the irresistible urge to write about life”. The next two novels - Rozptýlené podoby [Divergent Images] and Druhé loučení [The Second Farewell] – moved away from the current of memories and to a certain degree returned to storytelling. Both books create a counterpoint and at the same harmony in the complexity of the author’s view of people. On the one hand are “divergent images”, one being the concrete “I” (viz M Proust’s motto: “All these different lives which we lead at the same time…”), while on the other hand is the singularity of various people’s lives, the singularity of being: “We all live the same story, but each of us a different part.” These prose works map out the possibility of understanding between people and at the same time between narrative experiments: “The boundaries of comprehensibility are very narrow, the most important cannot be crossed.” Along with V. Linhartová, D. Hodrová and Z. Brabcová, Richterová is a writer whose prism of unusual narrative positions allows an examination of being in its multifaceted form. In certain passages the author’s prose comes close to poetry, and Richterová has shown herself to be adept in poetry in two collections - Neviditelné jistoty [Invisible Certainties] and Čas věčnost [Time Eternity]. The application of poetry allows her to get to the very heart of the language. She is fascinated by the similarity of words with different meanings, by their visual or aural resemblance, she plays with etymology, and when discovering a rhyme she will happily descend to the source in children’s nursery rhymes. While in her first collection there is a presentation of the “mirror of invisible certainties”, in her book of existential themes Čas věčnost [Time Eternity] she examines life from the perspective of its finite nature (“on the threshold of dust”), which oscillates between hope and anxiety. There is a more urgent return to the motif of reflecting on writing (“The writing wells up from fatal wounds…”) as well as to the limitations of human knowledge. She deliberately leaves a series of questions unanswered. A substantial addition to the work of S. Richterová is the loose “trilogy” of literary criticism collections (Slova a ticho [Words and Silence], Ticho a smích [Silence and Laughter] and Místo domova [In Place of Home], conventional in their analytical style. With an impartial view from her Italian observatory, equipped with insight and a feel for words, and educated in European literature and in various schools of literary criticism, she analyses the work of a distinctive group of Czech poets and writers (including V. Linhartová, M. Kundera, L. Vaculík, J. Skácel and J. Kolář). Some of the principal themes which are touched upon include: home and exile, ideology and memory, ethics and aesthetics, the centre and the periphery, the struggle between “the precarious unreliability of language, and its paradoxically crucial nature” and also silence, through which man returns to “the nameless, yet sacrosanct world of the self”.

(jn)

This profile was last updated on May 1st 2006

Deutsch Sylvie RICHTEROVÁ, Deutsch.doc

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