Authors

For five years he worked as an editor (and later as editor-in-chief) at the Regional Publishing House in Brno and from 1962–1970 he was an editor for the monthly and later fortnightly Host do domu, where he became editor-in-chief in the last year before the magazine was banned. After 1970 he was not permitted to publish and he made his living as, among other things, a night watchman and a binder; he actively participated in the development of Czechoslovakian literary samizdat. Between 1991 and 1995 he was chairman of the Obec moravskoslezských spisovatelů [Association of Moravian-Silesian Writers] and from that time he concentrated on journalistic work.

Although a natural prose writer, Jan Trefulka started out as a lyric poet (while he was a high-school student); paradoxically, however, he first gained recognition as a literary columnist when in 1954 he published an ironic polemic in Host do domu about the constructivist verses of Pavel Kohout, which was rightly understood by the authorities as a rejection (if not mockery) of schematism (and thus also Stalinism) in literary works. Also due to official sanctions, he made his debut relatively late; his first book, the short-story collection Pršelo jim štěstí, emerged from the “anti-dogmatic” prose of everyday life in the ’60s and complied with the postulate of depicting “the world around us”. The central theme of Trefulka’s prose became the fictionalization of the everyday, that is the “ordinary” experiences of equally ordinary characters. The author remained faithful to this poetic in his other books, which were dominated by episodic stories about the frantic search for an escape from the stereotyped life which was dictated by the social reality of the post-February 1948 period (e.g. Třiatřicet stříbrných křepelek). In the book Nálezy pana Mínuse the writer inclined towards the genre of the detective story; however, at that time he also experimented with the genre of literature for children and youths, and he began to work on his future synthesis of the novel. During normalization Trefulka was not allowed to publish his work officially and to a large extent his new prose works came out through the Petlice samizdat series and after that through exile publishing houses; they were published in the Czech lands shortly after November 1989. Although the author continued to write short stories (Vraždy bez rukavic), he concentrated mainly on the genre of the social novel, whose basic approach became the depiction of the experience of disillusion with post-war development in Czechoslovakia and general disappointment with socialist ideas; he then portrayed these in an absurd manner in an “image of criminal megalomania” (as Richard Svoboda characterizes the author’s vision). Right at the beginning of the seventies, Trefulka embodied his civic position extremely convincingly in the powerful model novel Veliká stavba – a work influenced by Kafka and Orwell, where he presented a merciless accusation of Stalinist brutality, projected into the actions and attitudes of “positive” heroes. For this prose work, the writer received the prestigious Egon Hostovský Prize for exile writers in 1984, also intended for creators of independent literature in Czechoslovakia. The issue of the search for one’s own identity became key in the title O bláznech jen dobré, which analyzed the limited possibility of participating in social and political events in the socialist Czechoslovakia of the time. The author attempted a polemic against the semi-official concept of the genre of the social novel in the documentary historical retrospective Zločin pozdvižení, looking from an unconventional angle at the “true” story of the Oslavany strike in November 1920. The outstanding work from those which Trefulka wrote during the twenty years of normalization can be considered to be the psychological novel Svedený a opuštěný, evidently biographically conceived, which analyzed the issue of the moral responsibility of individuals and society as a whole, ending up as the harrowing intellectual declaration of one symptomatic section of the writer’s generation. Since 1989 Jan Trefulka has finally been able to publish his samizdat or exile novels and short-story collections (mostly through the Brno publishers Atlantis); in this period, however, the artistic focus of his work has, of course, increasingly transferred to literary journalism, and especially the writing of columns. In his columns, the author primarily deals with the sensitive question of Moravian nationhood as well as the cultural phenomenon of Moravian-ness; from these texts several separate collections have been compiled (e.g. Bláznova čítanka). In 2004 Atlantis began to publish The Collected Works of Jan Trefulka.

Deutsch Jan TREFULKA, Deutsch.doc