Authors

His early works were in verse: the collections Ostrava and Boewulf [sic] arose out of a sense of the greyness, formlessness and hopelessness of life as experienced by the citizens of the Ostrava agglomeration under the Communist policy of ‘normalization’ in the 1970s. Vrak’s free, often prose-like verse is as full of recrimination, irony and sarcasm as it is of loathing for the Communist establishment, the metaphor for which is the recurrent motif of a factory – it brutally homogenizes human existence, converting it into a series of enforced operations. Linguistically, the collections benefit from the local colour of the regional Silesian dialects. After the mid-1990s Vrak turned to prose fiction. His novel-chronicle Obyčejné věci (Ordinary Things) is conspicuously autobiographical. Its main topic is the mundane: the heroes of dozens of parallel mini-dramas are apparently unattractive human types, mostly the foot-soldiers, but sometimes also the artillerymen of the age of Real Socialism, an age that manoeuvred so many individuals into situations where they then sundered not just the elementary relations among people, but even the traditional, deep-rooted ties of family. Vrak’s narrator compiles his stories out of personal experience, the tales told by the family chronicler Aunt Pauli, and snippets from parish chronicles. The locus switches between the grey mining centre of Havířov and the slightly quaint central Moravian village of Náklo, near Olomouc. The particular quality of Obyčejné věci is due in part to the deliberate disruption of the linearity of the narrative (through a system of footnotes and the insertion of samples of verse, technical digressions or quotations), and in part to the use of different strata of language: Vrak works with the lexis and syntax of colloquial Czech, the cliché-ridden sloganizing of period propaganda, and interpolated fragments of the local, highly individual Ostrava-Havířov dialect, with all the quirks brought into it from numerous nationalities. The action of Vrak’s second work of fiction, Osm hlav (Eight Heads), takes place exclusively in and around Náklo. Here the author exchanges with greater purpose the status of participant in the stories for that of an observer – the role taken by the archetypal peasant character, Pluskal – becoming a demiurge, a kind of latter-day mythopoet of a world created through words. Yet for Vrak his native language is not just a means of communication: in this book it has become a delicate fabric perceived aesthetically. Seen in this light, the author may be considered primarily to be a lyricist who extols the elementary values of life – the earth and sky, fields, houses and lakes, and love and the family – emphasizing their necessary linkages and man’s embrace of his native sod. This aesthetic gesture is the rivet that holds the sequence of variously long fragments of action and reflection (the heads of the title) together. These are typified by the deliberate fluctuation of the narrative mode, which at first reading evokes in the reader a sense of disintegration, a fragmentation of the whole into shards from which it is hard to reconstruct the proto-picture intended by the author. Vrak went furthest in reverencing authentic narration in Pan Kamarád (Mr Kamarád), which is stitched together out of dozens of hours’ worth of stories told by a 1950s political prisoner, Václav Kamarád. The resultant novel is a rough-and-ready, breathless Ich-form narrative, not so much the heroized testimony of one strong character as the authentic confession of a man who, for all the injustices he has suffered, manages to forgive all those who trespassed against him.

(ph)

E-mail: votobia@telecom.cz

Deutsch Jan VRAK, Deutsch.doc