Authors

Miroslav Salava is a poet of the darkness, of decadent scepticism, a kind of relic of the Middle Ages, plodding his way towards the present. The poet considers himself to be a “bad sort”, afflicted by pain which is inseparable from guilt, as is mentioned in the opening quote from Jean Pierre Camus in Salava’s second book of poetry, Krev můry. In his poetics Salava is close to the mannerist and decadent cryptograms of Jiří Krchovský, with whom he shares a negativity and scepticism, though not the playfulness with which Krchovský lightens his poetry; instead there clings to Salava’s verses the dust of mortality, of sin which is not only hereditary but also global and from which man tries in vain to redeem himself through flagellatory gestures and self-destructive torment, with Salava already subordinating all poetic devices. That is why his first work has the significant title Mé baroko [My Baroque]. A dark and shadowy baroque atmosphere, exaltation turning to disillusionment, spirituality attempting to overcome carnality and hedonism, the supremacy of a Šalamounesque feeling of the unceasing futility and uselessness of all actions and suffering is already apparent in Salava’s debut and reaches deeper in his subsequent books. A dim light, bizarreness and the howling voice of death and doom take centre stage, even if they sometimes paradoxically turn towards the tenacious search for lost harbours and anchors, reaching back to the past and almost stubbornly transmitting to the normalized present with its cult of anti-spirituality, kitsch, convulsions pouring into despair. „V obloze řasí se ticho olova / ze slova vzešel jsem Hynu doslova / Nehtem do okna ryju vzkaz / Tak dlouho trvám Podobraz / den kácí se aniž by vstal / Ke konci časů strojíme karneval“. Salava’s carnival is not a joyful, happy celebration, but rather monstrous with its disguises and masks, hyprocrisy, disillusion and mockery, convulsions and emptiness. It is as though the poet were taking us back in time to the clutches of Huizinga’s “autumn of the Middle Ages”, when during the inebriation of the carnival it was possible to carry out the worst crimes, murders and rapes, but also to say that which at any other time was gagged by convention and condemned to silence. Putridity, destruction, ruin and pain are seen as the last remaining human feelings, which, although negative, point to life and carry us away from the painlessness of death - these are the themes and motifs which Salava continually returns to with obsessive images from which the author creates his apocalyptic view of the present. Theatricality and a high degree of stylization and auto-stylization characterize the book Krev můry, whilst in Salava’s other opus, Zarakvití, there is a marked confessional tendency and diary feel combined with the specific location of the poet’s vicious circle, which is the monstrous shadow of the former Jesuit College in Prague’s Clementinum, where the Borges’ huge library is today housed, in which the poet works and where he situates his lyrical texts and notes. If Jiří Krchovský was mentioned in connection with Salava’s decadence, then in comparison with his landscape, which is more overgrown cemeteries and forgotten gardens, Salava is the poetic occupant of a home resembling an Escher labyrinth, filled with stairways rising up to corridors with never-ending perspective, as though these passages stopped at a mirrored wall. In such a Poe-esque house, where the walls have mouths and the windows resemble eyes, one is not only demasked but tormented and dislocated, subject to the temptation of desperation or the sin of passive devotion: „Z kůže stažen, nehty vyrvány, vlasy hoří a oči pokrývá šlem mlhy. / Za jazyk tažen, vznáším se, pluji, putuji těsně nad hroby, nad jícny / proklatosti. Mumlám prosby a nadávky a prokletí a zlobu a drtím se/ mámím, obluzuji a obelhávám. Křik nese se prostorem kol mě, / ničí vše nepevné, vše křehké. Strach nastavuje mi nohy a já letím/ do výhně – další uhel, další neštěstí, které lze pouze spálit.“ For Salava, the way out of this hell of torture and self-destruction is a kind of uncertain return to impressions, to the bare recording of the everyday, which death, pain and martyrdom overcome through an endless banality, but at the same time adherence to a life beyond good and evil: „Nádvořím ptáci ranní / zpívají místo ptaní / a déšť na mědi se třpytí / nezbývá než postát a pak – jíti.“