Novotný carries out an archaeological study of family memory, using lyrical and narrative means to explore the family microcosm he grew up in, and which in many respects also bears witness to Czech lives in the (post-) communist era.

Poetry

The Master of the title refers to the author’s father—a talented painter of whose work almost nothing has survived, just as little of his life has remained in the son’s memory (owing to his parents’ separation and his father’s premature death). In this book, Novotný attempts to reconstruct his father’s biography on the basis of testimonies from people who were able to share their lives with him far longer and more intensely than he ever could. Yet this poetic research endeavour repeatedly runs up against the same problem: the unreliability of memory and the inescapable elusiveness of the past. The Master is a collection of (pseudo) documentary poetry which sets in motion a play of meanings and relationships between reality and fiction, reliable testimony and the haze of recollection. At the same time, it is an intermedial work which, alongside the textual component (the poetry book), includes a sound composition capturing a collage of testimonies by witnesses who provided their accounts of the author’s father and enabled him to write the book—and finally, it also has a visual component formed by reproductions of the surviving paintings by Pavel Novotný Sr. In this threefold composition, the fundamental concept of the work is reflected once again: a demonstration of the relativity of human memory and the elusiveness of recollection – and of life itself.

Pavel Novotný (1976) is a poet, translator, German Studies scholar and teacher. He works at the Department of German Language at the Technical University of Liberec. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and cycles (e.g. Emergency Rules, Tramvesty, Notes from a Garret), and also writes prose. He is also the creator of radiophonic compositions for Czech Radio and has received a number of awards (including the 2010 Prix Bohemia Radio, the 2021 Magnesia Litera Award for Poetry, and the 2022 Dresden Poetry Prize). He has translated works by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Gerhard Rühm into Czech. As a literary scholar, he focuses on so-called acoustic literature, experimental radio drama and phonic poetry