Authors

After November 1989 he also worked in literary editing and participated in the founding of the Triáda publishing house, and since 1995 he has taught at Prague’s Vyšší odborná škola publicistiky. As an editor, he devotes himself to the literary legacy of his father and the cultural history of the Czech lands from an esoteric perspective. He is also intensively occupied with artistic work. He lives alternately in Tursko and in Prague.

Although the author’s early verses were broadcast in 1967 by the regional branch of Czechoslovak Radio, up until 1990 Václav Vokolek deliberately did not publish nor attempt to publish his work. His texts, which were circulated in literary or cultural circles in the form of free samizdat, often reached the wider public long after their creation, sometimes in a thoroughly reworked form. Even though it is possible to distinguish in some of the author’s works a marked propensity to blend techniques of poetic writing and prose story-telling, nevertheless in the majority of cases a clear dividing line of genre and style can be seen between the writer’s prose works and books of verse – and from this point of view, the nature of Vokolek’s work to date is distinctly bifurcated. His oldest and newest poetry collections continue the classical tradition of philosophical lyric poetry, with the author on the one hand inclining towards timeless cosmogonic positions and paraphrasing old myths and ancient literary parables with a great passion (perhaps most effectively and most convincingly in the book Triptych, which represents the aforementioned attempt at a symbiosis of poetic and prose narrative), while on the other hand Vokolek comes close to stylistic experiments, testing his expressive ability in the form of original visual texts and poetic fragments (first published in the cycle Nápisy, made available through the author’s own edition); at the same time, of course, on a number of occasions he very clearly aims at a systematic episodization of all poetic communication. His poetic work from the years 1971 to 1995, previously unknown to the public, was eventually selected and gathered by Václav Vokolek into the extensive literary cross-section Zříceninový mramor, a book in which he demonstrated exactly these fundamental spheres of his own poetic efforts and aims. In some of the author’s prose works a sombre or even tragic style prevails, manifesting itself most noticeably in the older litanical novella (or double novella) Pátým pádem, reworked for the purposes of its first publication in book form at the beginning of the nineties: in this work, Vokolek purposefully carries on the existential message of Boží duha, the classic book by Durych, in order to introduce some dissonant chords into a related theme and especially to extend the thematic span of the narrative up to the later years of the post-war period. However, much more frequently and in much more diverse form, grotesque or even tragi-grotesque notes are heard in the author’s prose texts: from this perspective and in accordance with this stylistic approach the writer thus examines and depicts the most varied erotic or interpersonal situations, in which he inventively confronts the real world with the more dramatically operating dream or fantasy world (for example, in the opening of his initially handwritten stories published in an anthology entitled Lov žen a jiné odložené slavnosti). This narrative style was eventually employed by Václav Vokolek, with varying degrees of inventiveness, in his other prose titles which were not given their finishing touches until the nineties (e.g. Okolí Bábelu); however, he put it to use most effectively in his grotesquely symbolic view of apparently invariable historical development and the fate of the incorrigible and irredeemable human individual (and also original fictitious paraphrasing of some motifs from The Devils by F. M. Dostoyevsky) – his dramatically conceived fictitious burlesque Cesta do pekel. This was a literary cycle of bizarre or tragi-comic scenes from the life of Czech-German Děčín, i.e. Vokolek’s birthplace, in the second half of the 19th century. At the same time the author concisely embodied his philosophy of time and art in Cesta do pekel. In this novel, however, the writer strives most of all for a farce about devils and spiritualism and he describes the gatherings and intrigues of all the denizens of hell, for whom, as for any true servant of Satan, what is of the utmost importance is that everything which will soon come to pass in the given symbolic region will become an “honest” road to hell. In their attempt to assume devilish powers, they primarily make use of various, perhaps eternal human vices and failings as well as people’s boundless naivety. That is to say, as soon as mankind (by no means only in Děčín) starts out on this road to hell, it is already devoted and enslaved to Lucifer forever. He can then contrive wars, revolutions and coups. Precisely this conception of the literary space as a setting filled with mysterious and otherworldly meanings later inspired Václav Vokolek to work on a cycle of popular publications in which he deals with the “secret” history of the Czech lands – region by region – from the viewpoint of their noteworthy and diverse esoterical topology. A particularly significant place in Vokolek’s abundant literary output is occupied by his memoir Krajiny vzpomínek, which takes us up to the beginning of the seventies. In this book, in which we encounter in many ways a quite engrossing depiction of the author’s own “emotional upbringing” in the post-war period, demonstrated by his deliberate rejection (also under his father’s influence) of some superficial and anti-existential cultural trends of the sixties, Václav Vokolek with immense intellectual and artistic intensity and also with a great lyrical fervour grasped and described the inspiring climate in which he grew up: above all, the atmosphere of creative and intellectual solidarity which reigned between banned and forbidden artists, especially those with a spiritual focus. An emphasis on the intellectual dimension of literary work is also key to Vokolek’s “serious” prose works, or even to some of the other grotesque styles and settings of the author’s literary work to date. His creative bibliography (in which we also find texts popularizing scientific issues) even contains a title from the sphere of literature for children and young people (Pán z Halabákova) as well as the writer’s sole attempt at an ethically urgent rendering of social themes through a reportage account of one person’s fate.

E vaclav.vokolek@seznam.cz