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 22nd March, before his 55th
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
