Authors
Josef ŠKVORECKÝ
He was born on September 27th 1924 in Náchod. After his school-leaving exams he was forced into the Totaleinsatz labour scheme until the end of the war. He studied medicine, but then graduated in English and philosophy at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. He taught at secondary schools and then worked for the Světová literatura (World Literature) review and in the Odeon Publishing House. From 1963 he worked on a freelance basis, but then in 1969 he went into exile and for twenty years he lectured and led courses on creative writing in English at the University of Toronto. In 1971 he and his wife, the writer Zdena Salivarová, founded the Sixty-Eight Publishers. In 1999 he was awarded the State Prize for Literature for classic modern Czech writing. Since retiring in the 1990s he has been living mainly in Florida. Josef Škvorecký died January 3, 2012.
The life and works of Josef Škvorecký have been closely examined in dictionaries of writers and other lexicographical reference books published after 1989, as well as publications by the Josef Škvorecký Society, founded immediately after November 1989, which thoroughly document the writer’s life and promote his work (for example through a CD-ROM). Due to his activities in exile his books were banned in Czechoslovakia for the twenty-year period of normalization, so the works which were written in Canada did not reach the Czech readership until the 1990s when there began a continuous stream of supplementary anthologies containing essays as well as youthful poetry writings etc. At the same time, however, there were few critical reviews as well as a surprising lack of attention by readers towards the author’s original literary works. If the State Prize for Literature went some way towards redressing this aspect, in general he is still mainly connected with his older books, especially with the classic postwar Czech novel Zbabělci (The Cowards). In this book, the first edition of which was written at the turn of the 1950s though not published until 1958, the author created his autobiographical literary alter ego Danny Smiřický, who goes on to become the main character in his subsequent novels which map the development of Czechoslovakia from the 1950s through to life in exile (incl. Prima sezona [The Swell Season], Mirákl [The Miracle Game] and Příběh inženýra lidských duší [The Engineer of Human Souls] ). Before August 1968 the author also brought out some excellent short stories and novellas with war and Jewish themes (Sedmiramenný svícen [The Menorah] ), as well as more humorous and sardonic reflections on the present (Legenda Emöke [Emöke] and Lvíče [Miss Silver’s Past] ). In the 1960s Škvorecký also began to write detective novels and he continued to write them in exile with his “Borůvka” cycle (the first collection of which was Smutek poručíka Borůvky [The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Borůvka] ). At that time, along with Jan Zábrana, he also wrote playful retro-stories, tried his luck as a screenplay writer and, not long before the August occupation, thrilled his readers with a magazine extract from his tragi-comic novel from the Stalinist years, Tankový prapor (The Republic of Whores). The writer was to publish this novel in its entirety in exile as the first edition to come from Sixty-Eight Publishers. Apart from detective novels, in Canada he also continued to write novels with Danny Smiřicky as the main character, and returned in various writings to the pre-August 1968 era. After 1984, however, he significantly changed his poetics: first of all he excelled with his humorously conceived novel about Antonín Dvořák’s stay in the USA (Scherzo capriccoso [Dvořák in Love] ). He then wrote his underrated novel about Czech emigrants in 19th-century North America at the time of the Civil War (Nevěsta z Texasu [The Bride from Texas] ). His extensive exile writings span several genres including Czech literary criticism (Na brigádě [Working Overtime]; with A. Brousek), and the history of the “new wave” in Czech cinema (Všichni ti bystří mladí muži a ženy [All The Bright Young Men And Women]). In Michael Špirit’s entry on Škvorecký in the academic Dictionary of Czech Writers since 1945 he unfortunately does not even bother to briefly characterize the author’s post-November 1989 work, even though by 1998, when the dictionary was completed, this had undergone several changes. After twenty years as a playful and amusing storyteller and commentator on the modern age, in The Bride of Texas Škvorecký transformed into an epic chronicler in a novel which is anchored by its historical approach, unlike the (deliberate) mischievousness of the fiction from the era of the Protectorate. The noticeable change from the ironic joker to the wise judge of ages is clearly evident in the “university” stories Povídky z Rajského údolí (The Edenvale Stories) in which the writer looks back intimately on the long period spent in exile teaching at university, with a tendency in these stories towards a certain relativism, which appears in the narrator’s philosophy of history and particularly in his concept of the everyday. Josef Škvorecký’s later texts are also increasingly marked by the appearance (often subtle and indirect) of the motif of god, faith and providence as a synonym for a higher, timeless wisdom. This metamorphosis in the artistic position of the writer proved to be more than symptomatic, and because of it, the public could better understand why in the latest of the author’s stories there are more narrative structures, which is characteristic of the current postmodern aesthetic. As in Nevysvětlitelný příběh aneb Vyprávění Questa Firma Sicula (An Inexplicable Story or the Narrative of Questus Firmus Siculus), so in the later, similarly burlesque prose of Pulchra (Pulchra) we see how, with great gusto, the writer employs paraphrases, parody and the use of literary models and is inclined towards numerous allusions so that in his mature works he can capture the chaos of the modern world and the labyrinth of contemporary thought, which is presented in the specific form of postmodern storytelling by a writer who happily plays around with language. An independent component of the author’s work from the turn of the 21st century has been the cycle of detective stories. Setkání po letech, s vraždou (An Encounter After Many Years, With Murder), which he began to write alone and which he continues to write with Zdena Salivarová, is an ongoing polemic concerning Czech characteristics and the circumstances Czechs find themselves in. Within his extensive prose bibliography there is a special place for his recently published book Obyčejné životy (Ordinary Lives), which he wrote when he was 80 and which provides a unique guide to his own works. He focuses on several characters and events so that afterwards he can incorporate them in the progress and linking of “ordinary lives”, connected to this are the social and historical realities – and in the end he creates a distinctive mosaic of lives from the author’s own generation – including those who were there at his birth and those who participated in his development. Even though the protagonists in question may have already appeared in earlier works, in Obyčejné životy they play a fascinating role. In some of the more documentary passages he also adds a somewhat secretive, detective element: when, for example, he recalls a certain Puchwein who taught him German at secondary school in Náchod. Immediately in the first lesson Puchwein lets fly about Dr Goebbels, but although Škvorecký leaves further clues, he never gives away explicitly that he is referring to Jiří Marek, a typical post- February 1948 “engineer of human souls”. Josef Škvorecký introduced this book with the eloquent wish that: “Perhaps it will welcome in readers who haven’t read anything by me yet.”
The bibliography can be found in PŘIBÁŇ, Michal (ed.). Bibliografie Josefa Škvoreckého. 2 vol. Praha: Literární akademie − Soukromá vysoká škola Josefa Škvoreckého, 2004 and 2005.
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This profile was last updated on January 3, 2011.
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Josef ŠKVORECKÝ
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