Cowards
Attention, Motherland summons heroes! But the revolution also requires observers...
Even in the border town of Kostelec, it seems that the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia is over and peace is in sight. On eight days in May 1945, twenty-year-old Daniel Smiřický puts down his tenor saxophone and sets out to "do the patriotic thing". And it will be a jazz blast, as he will prove with ease that he is a valid member of the nation of laughing beasts. For while the local elites organize the takeover, the collaborators paint themselves up and the rest of the Czechs fly flags according to how the situation is developing at the moment, Danny glosses over the chaos in a way unparalleled in the Czech novel.
The style of Josef Škvorecký's alter ego has always been excellent. And so he believably describes how he gets arrested furiously, how he works as a spy liaison and experiences harassment on the training ground, how he accommodates refugees with the vigour of a commando officer, sees a neighbour dying and helps to disarm a tank of the retreating Wehrmacht. However, he is not applying for the medal. He is slowly sobering up, not only from his unhappy love for Irena, but also from the rather lukewarm conviction that revolutions can make a difference, especially when the communists are shuffling alongside the Red Army hordes. So that soon this freedom won't be just the blues again!
What was barricaded or partisan pathetic in our prose about the war has been rustling the paper since the publication of Cowards. Danny's insight into the tragicomedy of the events of May stirred the stagnant waters to such an extent that it still speaks to us today.
They wrote about the book:
Škvorecký brought literature down from the imaginary Valhalla to the immeasurable vulgarity of the world of flesh and blood. Of all the communist mythology, the legend of liberation was the most sacred - so when he portrayed it through Danny's eyes, he broke the taboo. His hero has become the modern equivalent of Andersen's child, who has discovered the deception of the emperor's new clothes: just by calling things by their real names.
- Alfred French: Czech Writers and Politics 1945-1969
In the ferment of revolution, Danny is looking for anything authentic. At first he selfishly seeks his own gratification, gradually arriving at compassion for others and all-encompassing love, and finally at a sense of life's warmth embodied in one girl. (...) And it is precisely the mixture of the private and the historical that makes Cowards more than ever a landmark in the history of 20th century European sensibility. It is a vivid, moving, mesmerizing work.
- George Gibian, Professor of Slavic Studies at Cornell University (USA)
Josef Škvorecký
(1924-2012) The son of a bank clerk, he graduated from the grammar school in his native Náchod - in the Roman Kostelc - in the summer of 1943, but he was not allowed to enter university until after the war. After a flirtation with medicine, he switched to English-philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and after his studies taught in his native region. In 1951-53 he did his military service, grotesquely depicted in future books, and then worked as an editor at SNKLU (later Odeon), where he edited the new journal Světová literatura. After the scandal that accompanied the publication of his iconoclastic debut novel The Cowards (1958), he was forced to leave his post and married Zdená Salivarová. He has worked as a freelancer since 1963: as a translator, essayist and promoter of Anglo-Saxon genre prose, he contributed, among others, to. about theoretical (Ideas of a reader of detective stories, Sins for Mr. Knox) and practical (Lieutenant Borůvka's case series) development of detective stories with an unspectacular investigator. The author, also associated with the beginnings of cimrmanology, went to the USA in 1969 to lecture and after the dissolution of the Tank Battalion, which was not allowed to be published by the incoming normalisers, he and his wife settled in Toronto, Canada. They founded the Sixty-Eight Publishers, under whose imprint they published 220 other titles by proscribed compatriots in addition to this novel between 1971 and 1994. Škvorecký's Czechoslovak citizenship was demonstratively revoked in 1978 and he was not able to visit his homeland until after the Velvet Revolution.
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| Code: | AK1I088 |