Authors

Anna Zonová first made her public name as an art critic, publishing essays and reviews in such leading cultural journals as Host, Ateliér, or Literární noviny; it was only shortly before her fortieth year that she published her first work of creative prose: the volume of short stories entitled Červené botičky [Red Shoes]. The essential force of these austerely narrated tales does not lie merely in their powerful evocation of the atmosphere prevalent, perhaps even forming a definite presence, in the desolate rural landscape where they are set: specifically, the Jeseníky Mountains of north Moravia, a part of the Czech lands largely outside the interest of both the literary and the general publics, in its own way a kind of border region extending well into the interior regions. While unquestionably the actual circumstances of this half-forgotten corner of north Moravia and the striking characters of its inhabitants, quite frequently persons marked by tragic, tragicomic, even tragically grotesque fates, both personal and historic, do grant individual scenes within Zonová ’s stories an unrepeatable atmosphere, in no circumstance is the volume – despite the reactions of a number of reviewers – merely another case of regional or regionalist writing. By contrast, Zonová’s true creative focus is, in many ways, the unusually specific personal narratives of the real or fictitious inhabitants of her “native” territory (despite having been born in an entirely different region). In these texts, without exception, we are confronted with a wide range of examples of psychologically distorted personalities, whether merely bizarre or in fact the victims of inconceivable twists of fate. And at times, even the inconsolably desolate fates of two people, at a loss both with their separate and their shared lives. In many of the situations described, these figures and characters appear to have been left at the mercy of the most various, at first sight insurmountable vicissitudes. The lapidary narrative style strongly recalls expressionist or Cubist silhouettes; for this very reason, it would be useless to search for any psychological, or more accurately character-determining logic in Zonová ’s sketches. Zonov á ’s world is under the yoke of a strange anti-logic: everything in the stories and in the description they provide of the Jesen í ky region appears out of kilter, at least to the extent that readers are not surprised by the most bizarre deformations of character, even as they likewise attest to a definite type of unchanging human nature. Reviewers of Červené botičky had ample justification in stating that a fresh new prosaic voice had appeared – and it was equally evident that Zonová has the creative abilities and preconditions for longer, possibly even novel-length narratives. The linking of the genre of the short story with a much larger epic whole is what Zonová has attempted in her following volume Za trest a za odměnu [As Punishment, As Reward], a highly personal mosaic-text looking backwards in time to the immediate post-war decades in the Jesen í ky region, starting more or less in the 1950s, i.e. the period after the violent expulsion of ethnic Germans from the Moravian Sudetenland. In this book, Zonová strives to present both a relief of the historic period, viewed through the prism of the life-stories of various “insulted and injured” persons and figures, as well as an encapsulation of definite human experiences outside of historical specificities. In this respect, even the work’s title has emblematic significance: the depopulated border region of the Jeseníky Mountains was re-settled in good measure by persons sent there either by necessity (e.g. displaced persons), or by the punishment of a kind of indirect internal exile (e.g. families persecuted by the Communist authorities), yet at the same time life in this territory could seem, with the passage of time, its own kind of reward, repressing in its inhabitants the expressions of selfishness and short-sighted actions. Zonová created, as her overarching narrative framework, two almost comically divergent human stories: on the one hand the complex path of a former Communist official and her diplomat son, and on the other, the thoughts of a villager almost at the edge of idiocy, taking in the events of the world through chance phrases or equally unmotivated flashes of insight. Zonová ’s tale continues up to the present, in which in her depiction the myth of the land begins to dissolve into an inescapable confusion of values, marked by a tension between the categories of love (or sex) and of death and decay.

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