Authors
Jiří STRÁNSKÝ
He was born on August 12th 1931 in Prague to an elite First Republic family with a respected political name: his father, Karel Stránský, was a lawyer and a major figure in the Sokol movement, his mother, Božena, née Malypetrová, was the daughter of a well-known Agrarian Party politician who was President of the Chamber of Deputies. After the war Stránský became actively involved in the promotion of the scouting movement. After February 1948 he was prevented from finishing his secondary school studies for political reasons, he was called up to the Technical Assistance Corps (PTP), and in 1953 he was arrested and sent to prison for eight years for alleged espionage. In the Stalinist prisons he met with other imprisoned writers and he also began writing. Even after being released he was forced to carry out manual labour, though he became increasingly involved in external cooperation with the Barrandov Film Studios. He was imprisoned once again from 1973-1975, after which he worked for the State Song and Dance Ensemble. In 1990 he worked for the Czech Literary Fund, then from 1992-2006 he was the president of the Czech PEN Club. He is known to the public as a successful film and TV screenwriter, political journalist and author of children’s books.
The first literary steps of the future novelist Jiří Stránský were connected with poetry, though a type of prison poetry which emerged from the cruel conditions of the camps and was written without hope of being published in the near future. These early poems, which he brought together at the time in the collection Za plotem (Behind the Fence), were not to see the light of day for another forty years after they were written. The writer conveys in a documentary lyric style the state of mind of people living “behind the fence” – in other words, without freedom. This theme of the conflict between free-thinking people and society in a totalitarian regime which takes away freedom from these free thinkers and strong individuals and tries to break their characters and subjects them, in the interests of a conformist atmosphere, to a cruel emotional and moral ordeal, was to become a key point in Stránský’s literary outpoint. It was in this direction that the author took up the thematic suggestions of Karel Pecka, his fellow political inmate at the time. However, from the outset – whilst describing an identical or comparable social environment – he aimed at a different theory of the characters and story of the conflict. The events of spring 1969 meant that the author could publish his first work of prose Štěstí (Happiness), a cycle of impressive probes into the lives of people in the prisons and camps of the 1950s. However, only a few short stories were included in Stránský’s book and the majority of the editions were soon destroyed; the original collection of stories had to wait until 1998 to be published. At the end of the 1980s, Jiří Stránský was already working on an extensive series of novels in which he showed his understanding of conflicting societal themes (whose axis and common denominator was the theme of criminals, persecution, police interrogations etc) in the decades following 1945. The basic motif in the first novels of Jiří Stránský’s opus is the conflict between the young generation’s hopes for peace, and the great political and historical disillusionment during the Cold War, which was to paralyse their lives and which had a tragic impact on many other members of that generation (imprisonment, persecution etc). As in the novel Zdivočelá země (The Wild World) and in the later novel Aukce (The Auction), the writer combines his epic visions of contemporary history with specific individual fates (consciously located in a specific period) along with a distinctive narrative of minutiae, directed towards the creation of relief figures whose natural actions and obvious role of a model illustration of societal development predominate over psychological descriptions. The expressive quality of the plot of these books (both within the short stories from the collection Štěstí and in the novels with their modern family chronicle style) and their undoubted societal relevance led to them soon being made into films based on the author’s film screenplays – Bumerang (Boomerang) and Kousek nebe (A Piece of Heaven). However, a natural artist such as Jiří Stránský does not restrict himself solely to novels and short stories, or the aforementioned film screenplays and early poetical works. Though the author continues to write prose (the novel Tichá pošta [Chinese Whispers] ), he concentrates more and more on children’s books (Perlorodky [The Pearl Oysters], Povídačky pro moje slunce [Tales for my Sun] ), as well as on his first works in the area of literary drama (the plays Rozhovor [The Conversation] and Játra [The Liver] ). A selection of the author’s political articles is also awaiting publication in which his eventful life and experiences from prison combine with an insistent moral appeal to society and to individuals to prevent a recurring generational moral dilemma. Since the 1990s Jiří Stránský has been – due to his involvement in the PEN Club and in the public sphere – an unmistakable personality in Czech literary life, as is shown in the book of conversations which he had with Jan Lukeš (Srdcerváč [Heartbreaker] ).
(vn)
This profile was last updated on October 1st 2007
Deutsch 
Jiří STRÁNSKÝ, Deutsch.doc
