Czechs, Sex, Spies and Torture: Slovak Identity as Translation in Vilikovsky's Ever Green is. ..

OpenAlex · İngilizce

In 1963, the editors of the Prague publishing house Czechoslovak Writer launched a new series of short prose pieces called "Zivot kolem nás" ("Life Around Us"). The series began with an auspicious choice: a slim volume entitled Laughable Loves, the first work of fiction by the well-known Communist poet Milan Kundera. The series grew steadily over the next several years, and eventually included works by such Czech writers as Josef Skvorecky, Bohumil Hrabal and Ivan Klíma, as well as by a considerable number of Slovak writers. During the eventful "Prague Spring" of 1968, as Czechoslovakia was undergoing widespread reforms, the series published the short-story collection Citova vychova v breznu(Sentimental Education in March), by the Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovsky. The work was praised by a Czech critic for displaying qualities "which we in Bohemia have often valued in Slovak prose—a strong and vital sense of the epic." 1 After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, most of the leading writers in Prague were driven out of the official cultural scene, and like so much of the 1960s literary scene, the series "Life Around Us" soon came to an end. During the years of Soviet occupation, officially known in Czechoslovakia as "normalization," Vilikovsky was only permitted to publish one book—a detective novel—in Slovakia over the next twenty years. He remained active in the Slovak literary scene as an editor of the literary journal Romboid, and as a translator of some of the most innovative English and American writers, including Woolf and Faulkner, but he withheld his own unorthodox fiction from publication, aware that it would never pass the censors.