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EWALD MURRER AND HIS POETRY ABOUT A DISAPPEARING CULTURAL REGION IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Martin Pilar

Abstract

The contemporary Czech poet using the pseudonym Ewald Murrer (born in 1964 in Prague) used to be a representative of Czech underground literature before 1989. Then he became one of the most specific and original artists of his generation. The present essay deals with his very successful collection of poetry called The Diary of Mr. Pinke (1991, English translation published in 2022). Between the world wars, the most Eastern part of Czechoslovakia was so-called Subcarpathian Ruthenia (or Karpatenukraine in German). This rural and somewhat secluded region neighbouring Austrian Galicia (or Galizien in German) in the very West of Ukraine and the South- East of Poland used to be a centre of Jewish culture using mainly Yiddish and inspired by local folklore. The poems of Ewald Murrer are deeply rooted in the imagery of Jewish and Rusyn fairy tales and folk songs. While Marc Chagall, the famous French painter (coming from today’s Byelorussia), discovered these old sources of Jewish art for European Modernism, Ewald Murrer uses the same sources but his approach to literary creation can be seen as much more post-modern: he uses but at the same time also re-evaluates old myths and archetypes of this region with both a lovely kind of humour and more serious visions of Kafkaesque absurdity that are probably unavoidable in Central Europe. The fictional and highly poetic diary of Mr. Pinke is highly significant as a sophisticated revival of the almost forgotten culture of a Central European region that almost definitely stopped existing after the tragic times of the Holocaust and Stalinism.

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