The writer was born on September 27, 1924 in Náchod, where he graduated from a grammar school and during the war he was totally employed in a factory, which significantly influenced his work.
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After the war, he graduated from the Faculty of Arts in Prague (English and philosophy) and had to go to a place on the border.
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After completing his military service, he became the editor of the State Publishing House of Fine Literature and Art (Odeon). After his youthful attempts at poems, he published his first novel, Cowards, in 1958, where he demystified the end of the war in a small Czech town.
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His typical motifs such as jazz, unfulfilled desires and the inaccessible beauty Irena appear there. The inhabitants of the city are no heroes and they are definitely not burning for communism.
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Student Danny mainly wants to show off in front of Irena. The book caused a great scandal during socialism and Škvorecký was subsequently expelled from the magazine Světová literatura.
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The end of jazz and the march to the Sudetenland
Another excellent prose, The End of the Nylon Age, is a meditation on the unstoppability of time, which, among other things, captured the atmosphere well after February 1948.
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A tough communist dictatorship is just beginning, and friends, mostly university students, most of them former “golden youth” meet at a ball in Prague. They try to dance and converse easily, but it is clear to them that the end of the golden age has come.
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Some wise men have already taken office (Robert), but his beautiful wife Irena knows that the new regime, all this enthusiasm, is a terrible pretense. “It’s all vanity,” he says at the ball.
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Her ex-boyfriend Sam begs for attention, and everything is watched by a graduate teacher who tries to keep her face relaxed but is worried. He will have to leave Prague in the morning, jazz bands and unique beauties – he has been placed in the Sudetenland.
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“The golden youth who will either defeat communism or mature on it, but will certainly never let themselves be totally deployed on the border,” the young intellectual, the author’s alter ego, despairs over the injustice.
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Josef Škvorecký with his wife Zdena
Photo: Profimedia.cz
In 1969, Škvorecký managed to lecture at American universities, and when he was prevented from publishing the satirical novel Tank Battalion in Prague, which described the true communist army of the 1950s, he decided to emigrate with his wife Zdena.
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He settled in Toronto and founded the publishing house ’68 Publishers, which published banned works in Czechoslovakia (a total of 227 titles). But most of all, he continued to write.
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Škvorecký was an extraordinarily prolific author, he is the author of dozens of books, including short stories about the fate of the Jews.
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The great novel-thriller Lvíče was located in Prague in the 1960s. He also wrote the short stories Bitter World and Prima sezóna or a number of detective stories with Lieutenant Borůvka and the novel Mirákl.
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The story of the engineer of human souls is the opus magnum of Josef Škvorecký, a novel of great quality and quantity (it has over 790 pages). It can also be understood as a summary of his thirty-year work.
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It offers several stories in one. The author alternates narrators, perspectives, time planes and language layers. The characters spew various stories in an almost hashish way.
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We are in the Czech Republic for a while during the war, for a while in the 1950s, for a while in Canada in the 1970s or even in Australia.
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The text is interspersed with letters from the workers in the East Bohemian dialect, but also in German, English and also Canadian czenglish, a hard-to-understand hatmatilka of emigrants.
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The strongly ironic (and self-ironic) novel unmasks Nazi and communist nonsense, pulls on Czechs and foreigners, emigrants and amateur girls from Stb, who reveal themselves by confusing their lies.
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He also enjoys the figure of a professor who resembles Škvorecký himself. He is a non-heroic, bitterly comic character, just like the others. The topic of not understanding the Czech experience in the world and emigrant feelings partly connects him with Milan Kundera.
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Year 1994. Josef Škvorecký and Zdena Salivarová-Škvorecká back in Bohemia.
The novel from the seventies sounds scary up to date. A mature author who has experienced oppression under both Nazism and Communism naturally tends to tolerance and rejects moral judgments.
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He hates any radicalism, including political correctness, leftism, and radical feminism, to which he explicitly mocks.
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In a novel, for example, a Canadian colleague claims that the film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) is progressive, it is said to be a “critique of boyish limitations”.
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It was filmed by a woman. The narrator just shakes his head. Leni Riefenstahl may have made a high-quality film, but she promoted Hitler and got paid royally by him.
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“Every radicalism has only three sources and three components: stupidity, bad conscience or unmanageable hatred.”
Josef Škvorecký
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“I’m starting to have a vague idea of what women’s studios are,” notes Škvorecký in the novel.
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The author is tired of smiling at the idiocy of the Canadian salon communists, various feminist programs and seminars on Marxism. When Western fellow narrators invite them to such a seminar, they answer “been there.” Yes, he has heard enough about Marxism.
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The motif of a female student flirting with her teacher returns repeatedly. In The Story of the Engineer of the Human Soul, she is a college student named Svensson, who is hunting hard for her professor, who is hesitant, but not for very long.
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In another novel, Miracle, we find basically the same thing in an even bolder form – here the main likeable hero teaches at a girls’ school and starts with a high school girl.
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In the 1990s, Škvorecký also published a number of books such as The Voice of America, The Bride of Texas, The Story of the Unsuccessful Tenor Saxophonist and Two Murders in My Double Life. The last one was the short story Ordinary Lives in 2004.
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He has also inspired a number of films and series such as The Pastor’s End, Crime in the Shantan, Flirt with Miss Silver, the Tank Battalion and the series Scientific Methods by Lieutenant Borůvka.
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The film Cowards (he wrote the synopsis with Miloš Forman) and the Story of the Engineer of Human Souls were prepared for a long time, but the projects never managed to be completed.
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