Authors
Miloš URBAN
Fiction writer and translator Miloš Urban was born in Sokolov, Bohemia, on 4 October 1967, and later lived in London, England, from 1975 to 1979. After he returned home and finished secondary school in Karlovy Vary, he read Modern Philology at the Department of English and Nordic Studies, Prague. In 1992 he began work as an editor in the Mladá fronta publishing house, and has been an editor at Argo publishers since 2001. His published translations include works by Julian Barnes and Isaac Bashevis Singer. He lives in Prague.
A love of hoaxes of all kinds is a prominent feature of the Postmodernist writing of Miloš Urban. He not only published his first novel, Poslední tečka za Rukopisy (The Last Word on the Manuscripts), under the pseudonym Josef Urban, but also conceived it as a documentary account of a search for the true authors of the Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora manuscripts (real-life forgeries whose authenticity was hotly debated in Bohemia in the nineteenth century and thus considerably influenced Bohemian culture at the time). To reinforce the credibility of his account, Urban stated that the genre of this novel was ‘neolitfak’ (his term to designate ‘new factual fiction’), and went on ingeniously to mystify a number of intellectuals who unconditionally trusted his interpretation, and also to provoke outrage among rigidly conservative academics, who found themselves baffled by the resourcefulness of Postmodernism. This piece of ‘new factual fiction’ Urban style is primarily an intelligent paraphrase and parody of theoretical discourses as well as a psychological probe into contemporary Czech life after the Changes of November 1989. Writing in the spirit of the Postmodern game, toying with literary history, Urban exaggerates the combinatory capacity of this discipline, catching off guard those to whom his first work is addressed. Unlike the soppy interpreters of Božena Němcová’s womanhood, Urban, a highly suggestive hoaxer, discovers the psychosexual key to the marital and extramarital affairs of this nineteenth-century Czech writer, uses Freudian analysis to determine the life-long trauma of Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová (author of the classic cookery book of the nineteenth-century Czech bourgeoisie), and, most important, reveals the unconventional marital life of the bombastic Slavophil Václav Hanka, a man who had, among other things, successfully forged a certificate stating he was a qualified butcher. The conception of Urban’s next novel, Sedmikostelí (The Seven Churches), does not belong to ‘neolitfak’; rather, it is written in the spirit of the sensational murder story (the Moritat) combined with the atmosphere of the Gothic novel. The book links an adventurous, bloody, nightmarish plot with both a Postmodern interpretation of the historical topography of late medieval Prague and a deliberately outspoken defence of fourteenth-century ascetic Roman Catholicism as the moral counterpart to today’s civilization in decline: the author sees the present day as being in spiritual stagnation and an ethical cul-de-sac. Here, Urban verges on moralism and moralizing – and his last two novels do indeed suggest morality plays, even if the artistic impression they leave is ambiguous and the stylistic devices he employs are various. His third novel, Hastrman (Goblin), is from the start conceived as ballad-like fiction with elements of lyrical verse, in the ‘pagan’ setting of a Bohemian village in the late nineteenth century, a time when people allegedly lived in harmony with Nature, adhered to old customs and mythical rituals, and were far removed from modern faith in Reason and other Enlightenment ideals. Nonetheless, the writer then takes the action to the present-day, where it revolves around contemporary environmental and social problems, changing his writing into a ferocious journalistic pamphlet. The novel finally takes another U-turn in genre, now into a quasi-idyllic, if not outright pastoral, story set in the near future. Owing to the superb stylistic mastery of its opening chapters, Hastrman is still regarded as one of the most brilliant works of new Czech fiction. His latest work, Paměti poslance parlamentu (An MP Remembers), offers a different kind of morality. Urban envisioned this as the embodiment of his ideas on the modern political novel, a literary genre he considers deplorably lacking in Czech literature. Paměti poslance parlamentu continues the tradition of British political satire, before turning into a playful, partly Postmodernist, grotesque tale of pyromania and, mainly, pyromaniacs who help to remove from the face of the Earth not only the Czech parliament (a breeding ground for feeble minds and loose morals), but also depraved contemporary society as a whole – as is, after all, written in the Bible. Although the development from psychological reflections on the present day to moralizing memoirs in a Postmodernist style is not unique within Czech literature, Urban has brought to Czech fiction an insightful new delight in narration and an ability to move freely and spontaneously between many genres.
(vn)
Deutsch 
Miloš URBAN, Deutsch.doc
En français Miloš URBAN, En français.doc
