Villon meets Marx and dances on Stalin's grave in "GraveLarks" by Jan Křesadlo

In the borderlands of Ruritania and western Europe lies a fertile land particularly rich in "natural" and "intellectual" resources. Bohemia also occupies a special place in literary fiction and opera that arguably began before "La Boheme" however, it is with that opera that a wider notion of "Bohemian" became a global trope around the same time as the more universal "Ruritanian".

Jan Křesadlo's first novel, published by Jantar in 2015, offers a new memorable Bohemian character, Zderad. A magnificent satirical conceit,  transposing the life of the fifteenth-century bohemian troubador French poet, François Villon, into the singer, poet and Bohemian-with-a-capital B, Zderad. Fifteenth-century Villon is re-imagined here as a talented social misfit, exploring the rather Ruritanian notion of escape from oppression, through emigration within. 

Zderad, a noble misfit, investigates a powerful party figure in 1950s Czechoslovakia. His struggle against blackmail, starvation and betrayal leaves him determined to succeed where others have failed and died.

I must also point out the scale of the challenge to render this novel into English. The original – with its Czech language antics, often playfully idiosyncratic changes of ‘register’, interspersed with the Roma language and its pidgin Slovak and Hungarian cameos, Sudeten German, French and Russian, as well as segments in Latin and, most saliently, in classical Greek – is just not an easy novel to translate. Full congratulations are deserved for Václav Pinkava even to attempt it, yet here, he simply bosses the English narrative.

Josef Škvorecký would often identify Křesadlo, and not the better known Milan Kundera, as 68 Publishers’ greatest writer, even calling him “entirely unique”. However, Škvorecký is not Křesadlo’s only high profile admirer.

Peter Pišťanek (1965-2015), the award-winning Slovak author of the Rivers of Babylon trilogy, often spoke of his admiration. In his lifetime, he published a number of articles about Křesadlo, collected here in the Afterword. In his allegorical piece, Pišťanek boldly places Křesadlo on a pedestal as “the greatest post-war Czech writer”.

      Pišťanek also alludes to Křesadlo’s favourite armchair crusade: Milan Kundera. Křesadlo despised the former Stalinist author and later professional dissident, regarding him as a morally challenged pseud. He would use pejorative allusions to Kundera for the names of his anti-heroes in his later novels.

A triumphant intellectual thriller navigating the fragile ambiguity between sado-masochism, black humour, political satire and hope.

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