Literary fiction

Jiří Kratochvil is a representative of contemporary prose that has been systematically tending away from realism; he is, at the same time, one of the most translated Czech authors. His novel Fox into a Lady is set in the 1950s, and two storylines intersect in it. The more realistic one concerns a young worker from Brno called Pavel, who is selected as a promising and linguistically talented STB agent to go to the West and sabotage Radio Free Europe. The other fantastic story centres around a young fox cub. Stalin (in the novel called Custodian) tasks scientists from the Pavlov Institute with transforming the cub into a woman in order to dispatch her, under the name Sylva, to the West to kill Winston Churchill. However, the heroes meet in the free world and their stories and fates become intertwined – life is shown to be more powerful than the plans of the mighty. The novel Fox into a Lady is a tribute to the imagination, literature as a game of words and images, while offering on one hand a powerful story about deep connection and on the other the incompatibility of different worlds and the celebration of human and fox freedom.