It wasn’t until he was forty that he made his debut with the novel Mr. Theodor Mundstock, and he had success with Natália Mooshabrová’s Mice or the later filmed Incinerator of the Corpses. He lived in an apartment reminiscent of a mausoleum with a stuffed parrot, selflessly cared for his mother until her death, and after the August occupation became a pillar of the normalization regime. The 100th anniversary of the birth of the writer Ladislav Fuks is commemorated by an exhibition in the Prague summer house Hvězda.
The show, organized by the Museum of Literature, is called The Counterworlds of Ladislav Fuks. Spread over two floors, it will last until October 31.
One of the most acclaimed Czech fiction writers of the second half of the 20th century, Fuks lived from 1923 to 1994. He became famous for his psychological prose depicting the anxiety of a person who is threatened by violence, crime or totalitarian unfreedom.
Although a Christian himself, he faithfully described the exclusion, humiliation and horrors that Czechoslovak Jews felt from the 1930s. He evocatively captured the impending doom, in which man loses his rights, social status and ultimately life itself. Many of his works have a symbolic, even fateful tone. He often chose defenseless, weak or opinionally unstable individuals as heroes, who are unable to face the pressures of the dark reality and long to escape the burdensome present. He was attracted to the topic of perpetrators and executors of violence, more generally the problem of evil and its obvious and hidden forms.
In his memoirs, Fuks wrote that it is most fully contained only in his own books. “If someone reads them a hundred years from now, he won’t be interested in what I was like,” he said in the text he worked on in the last years of his life, but which was published by the Melantrich publishing house only after his death. Before that, he systematically destroyed notes or manuscripts that he did not want to share with others.
The curator of the current exhibition, Michaela Kuthanová, did not wait for the anniversary of the publication of Fuks’ first novel, Mr. Theodor Mundstock, which made the then forty-year-old debutant famous in 1963, but took advantage of the 100th anniversary of the writer’s birth. This falls on September 24.
Writer Ladislav Fuks in a picture from 1988. | Photo: CTK
The show is divided into thematic units and uses various audiovisual formats. In one room, the visitor can open the curtains, sit in a special area on a wooden chair and listen intently to audio recordings of literary texts from a loudspeaker suspended above his head. These are radio productions – Mr. Theodor Mundstock voiced by actor Lukáš Hlavica and Myša Natália Mooshabrová performed by Jiří Ornest, who is no longer alive, from 2006.
In the next room, the viewer watches two versions of the film adaptation of Fuks’s novel The Corpse Burner projected on intentionally slightly deformed screens, similar to how the human psyche changes under the pressure of difficult times, which was one of the author’s themes.
Ladislav Fuks transformed his small apartment in Prague’s Dejvice into an ornamental cabinet of curiosities. “The windows were covered with window wallpaper with a Gothic pattern, several paintings and antique objects were complemented by fair trinkets, souvenirs of strange origin, and in addition to a dimly lit chandelier, a cage with a parrot was hung from the ceiling. A stuffed one, of course,” described the lyricist and journalist Michael Prostějovský, according to whom the room it looked depressed, resembled a warehouse, and friends sometimes nicknamed it a mausoleum. “There are people who like candy or girls, he just liked bullets and corpses,” director Juraj Herz described Fuks.
Regime honors
This aspect of the writer’s personality is referred to in the exhibition by a room full of furniture partially wrapped in Fuks’s texts and supplemented with editions of his books. In addition, there are excerpts of Italian operas that the novelist used to play from a cassette tape recorder at home. Visitors can explore his original study from a video taken in October 2000, six years after the author’s death.
In another room, sarcophagus-like objects reveal collections of curiosities reminiscent of Natália Mooshaber’s book Mice, a 1970 horror novel.
The exhibition also includes a photo of Ladislav Fuks with the writer Max Brod from June 1964. | Photo: archive of the Museum of Literature
According to the organizers, the audience will be surprised by a set of grotesque modern figures, probably made by the writer. In the glass display cases, there is Fuks’s school drawing of the cemetery, samples from his correspondence, photos from parties with the painters Kamil Lhoták and Jan Špála, a photograph of Fuks with the writer Max Brod, and the manuscripts of The Corpse Burner with author’s notes.
You can also see the honors with which Fuks was included by the communist regime in exchange for his loyalty – for example, the title of meritorious artist, which he received from the Minister of Culture in 1978, or the honorary diploma for “meritorious work for the development of socialist cinema”, awarded on the occasion of the anniversary of the nationalization of cinema and signed by Jiří Purš, the central director of the Czechoslovak State Film.
According to the organizers of the exhibition, Fuks did not emigrate after August 1968 because of his dying mother. Gradually, however, he became more and more subject to the pressures of power, gave servile interviews, defended normalization practices, and his fiction during the 1970s was characterized by an effort to deal with so-called engaged topics, for example the novel Return from the Rye Field about post-February emigration. In exchange, the writer could travel abroad and devote himself to literature without the need for another permanent job.
“We know that in the 1970s and 1980s members of the State Security visited him, about which he allegedly kept detailed diary entries. However, they were never found in his apartment or in the police archives,” the exhibition states. The organizers also speculate that Fuks may have feared the publication of information about his homosexuality, which was a criminal offense in Czechoslovakia until 1961 and was later perceived negatively by the public for a long time.
The theme of mirrors winds through the exhibition. | Photo: CTK
Anxiety and threat
Throughout the exhibition, Fuks’s favorite motif of mirrors, which enchanted him as a boy when visiting the Petrin maze, winds its way. Here you can also see illustrations by the well-known artist Stanislav Kolíbal of Mr. Theodor Mundstock or listen to a recording of a conversation with Fuks from 1988.
For some artists, a deep experience from their youth results in a lifelong theme that they can’t seem to let go of. For many writers of the second half of the 20th century, it was the appalling events of the Second World War, from the Czech ones, for example, Arnošt Lustig, Jiří Weil, or just Ladislav Fuks. They determined the mood, themes and focus of his work.
Fuks came from a police official’s family. During the war, he was totally employed in the protectorate administration of estates in Hodonín. He later studied philosophy, art history and psychology at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.
From 1950 he worked as a paper mill worker in Běla pod Bezdězem and then at the Prague company Křídové papíry. In 1956, he became an expert at the State Monuments Administration, and three years later he was employed by the National Gallery. Stays in Vienna in the 1970s became important for his work, states Dictionary of Czech literature.
He made his debut with the novel Mr. Theodor Mundstock, which introduced absurdity and human tragedy into the local environment, seen through more or less grotesque characters. The book, loosely referring to the works of Franz Kafka or Life with a Star by Jiří Weil, tells the story of a Jewish official searching in vain for salvation in a bizarre rehearsal of situations that would enable him to survive transport and a concentration camp under the protectorate.
The themes of the text are racial hatred, the persecution of Jews, and on a more general level, the psyche of a person confronted with fear, anxiety and threats. It is not the only text by Fuks with a Jewish theme, which he further addressed in the ballad novella Journey to the Promised Land or in The Incinerator of Corpses.
Many of his works balance on the border between reality and dream. He was a master of the mask, of disguises and hints, which as a homosexual was predestined by the times. In his books, he often engaged in hard-to-detect pranks and more than once played a subtle game with the readers.
In 2019, the digitally restored version of the film The Incinerator was returned to cinemas by the National Film Archive. | Video: National Film Archive
The general public knows Fuks thanks film adaptation Corpse incinerators. The story about crematorium employee, exemplary husband and father Karl Kopfrkingl, who takes his job as a mission and speaks about death with inexpressible admiration, was filmed by Juraj Herz with actor Rudolf Hrušínský in the lead role. At the exhibition in Hvězda, people can list a copy of the technical script.
The film, which premiered in the spring of 1969 and soon ended up in the vault because of the communists, presents a grotesque picture of the decay of the human personality. Like the novel, it works as a parable about violence. Kopfrkingl describes himself as a romantic, abstinent and music lover, but under the mask of smoothness and order, he long ago succumbed to the lure of power and became a depraved executor of evil.
The life and work of Ladislav Fuks is more closely presented, for example, in a monograph by the literary scholar Erik Gilko entitled Winner and Defeated – Proseographer Ladislav Fuks, published in 2013 by the Host publishing house.
