Today is the first anniversary of the death of Peter Pišťanek

Peter committed suicide. There is a plan to celebrate what would have been his 56th birthday in London on 28 April. The Ruritanian will post more details when they become available.

Below is the obituary written by his British Publisher, Donald Rayfield.

Peter Pišt'anek, the most brilliant of modern Slovak novelists, has died on Sunday 22^nd March, before his 55^th birthday, in a Bratislava hospital, after taking an overdose. Born in 1960, he was first known to the public as a  drummer in a rock group (a life he portrayed uproariously in his novella "The Musicians"). Even before the fall of communism his exposure of the underbelly of Slovak life and his satire of Slovak national pretensions (which he called ‘narcissism’) caused a stir. His real genius became manifest in the novel "Rivers of Babylon" of 1991, which with "The Wooden Village" and "The End of Freddy" became a trilogy, following the transformation of a ruthless village thug first into Slovak ‘businessman of the year’ and then into a Russian oil oligarch. (These three novels were translated into English by Peter Petro and published by the Garnett Press in 2007 and 2008, the first of them ending quite high up the Independent Foreign Fiction Long List.) Pišt'anek’s plotting had the ingenuity of Quentin Tarantino, the irony of Evelyn Waugh and, at times, the obscenity of Henry Miller. Yet his novellas could express sympathy for the underdog, such as the hero of the eponymous "Young Dônč". His language exploited to the full the rich mix of Bratislava Slovak, with its undertones of Viennese German, of Hungarian and of Gypsy. At the same time, uniquely among Slovaks, Pišt'anek took pride in his ability to write in Czech: the Prague scenes of The End of Freddy switch to Czech.

            Rivers of Babylon has now been translated into several European and Asian languages; Pišt'anek recently published a new novel, The Hostage, which was to be filmed. He seemed at the threshold of international recognition. But despite psychotherapy and a happy remarriage, the depression that periodically plagued him, returned.

            Peter Pišt'anek took delight in provoking authority: his "Tales about Vlad" were a thorn in the flesh of Vladimír Mečiar, the Slovak prime minister. For all his dark satire and knowledge of the worst of human nature, however, Peter Pišt'anek was a kind, reticent and considerate man, with an uproarious sense of humour. He was an expert on many things, for instance brandy and whisky, having visited all the distilleries of the Highlands and Islands. He had an endearing resemblance to Uncle Fester of the Addams family, and those who had dealings with him — whether as friends, translators or publishers — felt both admiration and a desire to look after him, a feeling which we now know we expressed inadequately.

Donald Rayfield