Authors

Two motives drive Vodseďálek’s poetry, written, with breaks, between the late 1940s and the end of the 1980s. One is his confessed fear of possible persecution as a writer of fiction when Stalinism peaked in Czechoslovakia after 1948: ‘I thought it would be difficult to punish a poet for strange verse. […] But prose fiction comes closer to how journalists write and so is politically dangerous,’ he says. The other driving force was the need to find a literary substitute for the tired aesthetics of Surrealism, where his roots lay, using devices adequate to the age. Since, as he has also said, he felt embarrassed and ashamed at the one-dimensional and restrictive cultural policy adopted after the Communist takeover in February 1948, he began writing in the spirit of a paraphrase of André Breton: ‘Poetry will either be embarrassing, or there won’t be any.’ From what is known as ‘poetry of embarrassment’, which is based on a deliberate disruption of rhyme and rhythm and on contents suffused with hyper-optimism and primitivist fabulosity (as in the work Zuření – Ranting), laying bare not only what made the times an embarrassment, but also their tragedy and absurdity, he switched to a verse whose imagery was anchored in an inner world of dreamed-up experiences and events (Snění – Dreaming). Having fumbled experimentally with visually and syntactically innovative verse forms (Bloudění – Roving), he had evolved by the mid-1970s into a documentary poet, recording the strictly mundane with the object of providing, from the standpoint of the voluntary outsider, a witness statement on the age and on the hierarchy of values in its culture and society (Probouzení – Awakening, Nalézání – Finding). The critic Bohumil Svozil writes: ‘Yet most of his records of realia tend towards more general theses, voicing fundamental questions of morality, philosophy, theology or mysticism. In terms of genre, Vodseďálek’s poetry amounts to morality plays or essays in verse with a strong tendency to directness of the message.’ Much the same could be said of his fiction, which became an informal adjunct to the verse, especially in the 1990s. The stock-taking Felixír života (The Felixir of Life) is a patchwork of real and dreamed scraps; with a touch of optimism it picks over the events, situations and odd details that make up the last five decades of Vodseďálek’s life. In terms of method, the book looks back to the author’s beginnings in Surrealism: the fan of genres, which spread in these miniature texts from literary reminiscence through probes into psychology and idiosyncratic musings to quotations and jottings from things the author had read, is held together by a network of overt and covert connections and analogies which the author develops with a sense of the mystifying realism and absurdity of the mundane in the spirit of Dalí’s method of paranoic criticism. In the book’s Afterword, Martin Pilař notes: ‘Felixír života is far removed from traditional memoir literature, which is usually marked by the leisurely, chronicle-like flow of the narration. It differs […] above all in the volatility of meanings and in an awareness that the understanding and deeply felt experiencing of a single moment has no less a cognitive value than the description of the events of a longer time-span.’

(rk)

Deutsch Ivo VODSEĎÁLEK, Deutsch.doc