Authors
Jáchym TOPOL
Writer and journalist Jáchym Topol was born in Prague on 4 August 1962; his father is the poet and dramatist Josef Topol. Having completed his school-leaving examinations, he continued his studies briefly at a vocational school for social work, after which he worked in various labouring jobs and spent some time in receipt of disability benefit. From the early 1980s he was involved in literary activities of a samizdat and underground character: he was instrumental in the genesis of the Mozková mrtvice underground imprint, and was a co-founder and editor of the magazines Violit and Jednou nohou (soon re-named Revolver Revue, of which he was editor-in-chief from 1990 to 1993). In recent years Jáchym Topol has worked as a freelance. He has worked (most recently since 2005) as a reporter for Respekt, a weekly whose founding - as the samizdat publication Sport - he co-initiated. For a number of years he was a student of Ethnology at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. The prose writer and musician Filip Topol is his younger brother.
Jáchym Topol made his first appearance in samizdat collections as a poet. His early work - in which as a journalist he took a special interest in issues of nationality and racial minorities, the lives of political exiles and social manifestations of xenophobia - is generally characterised as "independent" writing. Topol's early career also includes the writing of song lyrics for the music group Psí vojáci, an activity he resumed in the 1990s, when he worked intensively with the singer Monika Načeva. Topol's early, samizdat collections (for some of which he used a pseudonym) are typically in full compliance with the poetics and aesthetics of the underground; they were informed by their author's non-conformist attitudes, concentrated on the formulating of a political protest against the pre-1989 regime, and - first and foremost - they gave voice to a code of ethics espoused by members of Topol's generation, for whom - together with J. H. Krchovský, Vít Křemlička and Petr Placák - he eventually emerged from the underground to become a spokesman. The lexis of Topol the poet also addressed the demands of the underground; it shattered certain conventions of expression, seeking at the same time to provoke the rougher side of linguistic communication. After 1989, three of Topol's longer poem cycles first issued in a samizdat volume under the collective title I Love You Madly, became his calling card as a poet; at its most inventive this work demonstrates a defiance and a negation of everyday realities almost romanticist in nature. Topol's career as a poet reached a turning point at the beginning of the 1990s with his sublime, thus far latest collection The War Will Be On Tuesday, in which his attitudes advance towards those of existentialism, at times even late existentialism. In this work Topol's rhapsodizing is more moderate in its expression, although on the level of social protest he takes an obvious step in the direction of a more universal conception of life, seeking in the circumstances of modern man indications of the parable, not least in the ever-present portents of civilizational catastrophe. Topol's prose, too, is unambiguously premised with these important meditations. And it was to prose that he turned his full attention in 1994 with the publication of his debut novel City Sister Silver, which was characterized by certain critics - with a degree of hyperbole attributable to enthusiasm of the moment - as the "novel of the decade". As the case may be, City Sister Silver symbolizes in Topol's oeuvre a categorical turning point, a swing towards a postmodern conception of today's world on the verge of apocalypse which employs the stylistics and structures of the postmodern. The author's focus is on destructive and negativistic phenomena of contemporary civilization, which - by diverse, multi-dimensional means - he interprets as a state of chaos in which traditional values (including ethical and social) are disintegrating. Topol commonly invests his prose with motifs signifying the latent presence of catastrophe. Incidentally, it is highly symptomatic that Topol should seek his picture of a world which focuses on the struggle for sheer survival and the removal of a hierarchy of moral values in the "folklore" of the Stone Age (as his work as editor of a collection of early North American folk tales - entitled Thorn Girl - attests). City Sister Silver is characterized by an excess of sudden, peculiar shifts in language and lexis and the frequent transforming of assumptions of genre. Some of Topol's subsequent, lesser works of prose (eg., A Trip to the Train Station and - in particular - the bestselling novella Angel Exit) emulate City Sister Silver's great thematic variation in the portrayal of the global problems which confront humanity, but they are more intimate, following the path taken by a single life or - as is the case with Angel Exit - unfolding the tales of a number of individuals. After a creative silence of several years Jáchym Topol published two new novels (Night Work, To Gargle Tar), in which he opens out a wide range "Topolesque" motifs (notably apocalypse as a very real alternative to social evolution, and the also apocalyptic, keen processes of entropy which take hold in the human soul). In these later novels Topol embarks on a form of fiction which becomes gradually less important in terms of postmodern poetics but asserts ever more strikingly a conception of the narrative in fiction as a symbiosis of elements of adventure and philosophical parable. Topol continues to focus on the circumstances of specific individuals, even though the form these take and the chosen settings for the narrative are subject to ever greater stylization.
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This profile was last updated on 1 January 2007.
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Jáchym TOPOL
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