Scholarly record

THE VISION OF WAR IN POETRY AND FICTION OF JACHYM TOPOL

M. Pilar

Abstract

Jachym Topol (born 1962) is a Czech poet, novelist and rock musician whose literary works have been translated to more than ten languages up to now. He comes from a well-known Czech literary family (e. g. Karel Schulz, Josef Topol), started his career as a Czech “angry young man” and a representative of Czech underground culture in the 1980s. After 1989 he began to write novels which are rooted in the underground way of expression but at the same time are discussed as samples of typically postmodern prose. Especially his novels successfully address broad international audience because they very often deal with the theme of an outsider who tries to find his way of survival in the war or post-war situation. The war theme appears in early poetic works by Jachym Topol, but the war is neither in his poems nor in his later prosaic fiction primarily understood as a result of political failure. Basically, it is described as something eternally present, and mankind mostly fails in trying to get rid of this kind of evil. There is no strict division between Topol’s poetry (very often using epic narrative techniques) and his prose fiction (with numerous lyrical passages). In both these types of artistic expression, Topol prefers a mythological understanding of time and space, and this allows him to describe the influence of WWII and the Cold War on the human mind in a more general meaning and to overcome rather narrow political and historical cliches so often repeated in public discourses. Topol’s description of post-war (post bellum) absurdities is strongly moving and provokes readers by stressing the fact that wars have never disappeared from the world history – that every post bellum means a new ante bellum at the same time.

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