Page 104 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 104
Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices
“The city acts in the story as a representative of the present while the vil-
lage as that of the past” (Kopáč 2016). The city arouses persistent unease,
sense of being unfulfilled, unanchored, sometimes articulated explicit-
ly, sometimes rather covertly. We see it once as a travel obsession, once as
the protagonist’s chronic insomnia with disconsolate night hours, staring
into the empty white ceiling. Markéta Kittlová uses a different phrasing
to characterize the conception of the village: “In Dešťová hůl, the world
of the village is largely shifting into Zbyněk’s memories, thereby becom-
ing a lost paradise” (Kittlová 2016).
The protagonists of these novels come back some time later and are
confronted with their own past, the past of their loved ones and their an-
cestors. This “web of human lineages is described as an inseparable part
of personality, subconscious affiliation to the birthplace, from which it
104 is impossible to free oneself, just as it is impossible to forget old wrongs”
(Mindeková 2009, 130).
In her review of Hájíček’s collection of short stories Vzpomínky na
jednu vesnickou tancovačku, Kubíčková quite accurately characterizes the
most common ways used to depict the village in contemporary prose:
It is hard to find someone in Czech prose who can describe our countryside
in such a realistic way without ridiculing it or exaggeratedly romanticizing
it (Kubíčková 2014).
As we have seen earlier, the same goes for the Slovenian environment.
Completely disturbed relationships not only among the people with-
in the village, but also within the families themselves, are depicted in the
novel Dědina (2018) by Petra Dvořáková (1977). The motivational back-
ground of human acts is formed by sexuality, alcoholism, even patholog-
ical greed or chronic envy:
The worst part is that people are envious. They’re awfully envious and re-
member everything! Everybody still keeps giving me a hard time ‘cause a
farmer’s daughter bought herself a shop. And they say she rakes it in on peo-
ple again, as she once did. But they’ve already forgotten that my folks had to
surrender everything to the cooperative (Dvořáková 2018, 78).
All of this completely disrupts even the most honest attempts to rec-
oncile the family or correct relationships within the community. Here,
the village appears to be a desperately emptied, valueless and non-spiritual
space that cannot be cemented and uplifted, not even by attempts to re-
vive a sort of ancient peasant myth with an attachment to the land made
by the protagonists who have been given back the once-cooperative land.
“The city acts in the story as a representative of the present while the vil-
lage as that of the past” (Kopáč 2016). The city arouses persistent unease,
sense of being unfulfilled, unanchored, sometimes articulated explicit-
ly, sometimes rather covertly. We see it once as a travel obsession, once as
the protagonist’s chronic insomnia with disconsolate night hours, staring
into the empty white ceiling. Markéta Kittlová uses a different phrasing
to characterize the conception of the village: “In Dešťová hůl, the world
of the village is largely shifting into Zbyněk’s memories, thereby becom-
ing a lost paradise” (Kittlová 2016).
The protagonists of these novels come back some time later and are
confronted with their own past, the past of their loved ones and their an-
cestors. This “web of human lineages is described as an inseparable part
of personality, subconscious affiliation to the birthplace, from which it
104 is impossible to free oneself, just as it is impossible to forget old wrongs”
(Mindeková 2009, 130).
In her review of Hájíček’s collection of short stories Vzpomínky na
jednu vesnickou tancovačku, Kubíčková quite accurately characterizes the
most common ways used to depict the village in contemporary prose:
It is hard to find someone in Czech prose who can describe our countryside
in such a realistic way without ridiculing it or exaggeratedly romanticizing
it (Kubíčková 2014).
As we have seen earlier, the same goes for the Slovenian environment.
Completely disturbed relationships not only among the people with-
in the village, but also within the families themselves, are depicted in the
novel Dědina (2018) by Petra Dvořáková (1977). The motivational back-
ground of human acts is formed by sexuality, alcoholism, even patholog-
ical greed or chronic envy:
The worst part is that people are envious. They’re awfully envious and re-
member everything! Everybody still keeps giving me a hard time ‘cause a
farmer’s daughter bought herself a shop. And they say she rakes it in on peo-
ple again, as she once did. But they’ve already forgotten that my folks had to
surrender everything to the cooperative (Dvořáková 2018, 78).
All of this completely disrupts even the most honest attempts to rec-
oncile the family or correct relationships within the community. Here,
the village appears to be a desperately emptied, valueless and non-spiritual
space that cannot be cemented and uplifted, not even by attempts to re-
vive a sort of ancient peasant myth with an attachment to the land made
by the protagonists who have been given back the once-cooperative land.
