Hailed as one of the most important Eastern European writers of the post-Communist era, Pavel Vilikovsky actually began his career in 1965. But the political content of his writing and its straightforward treatment of such taboo topics as bisexuality kept him from publishing the works collected here until after the Velvet Revolution.
"There's a little of Bohumil Hrabal's playfulness and Karel Capek's bracing good-natured contempt for image cultivators and ideologues in this fine collection of three astringent tales. . . . Captivating, thought-provoking fiction." - Kirkus Reviews
"The originlaity of this work lies, first of all, in its style...and second of all, in the nature of the author's meditations on such subjects as death and dying, imagination and literature...Before the twentieth century closes its door, it would be extremely salutary to spend some time in the Bratislava of Pavel Vilikovsky, as we have spent some time in the Dublin of James Joyce or in the London of Virginia Woolf." - World Literature Today
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
Pavel Vilikovsky, widely seen as one of the most important and popular contemporary Slovak writers, died in Bratislava at the age of 78 in February 2020.
A writer, translator and journalist, Pavel Vilikovsky was born at the height of World War II in 1941 in Slovakia’s Zilina region, but spent most of his childhood in capital Bratislava. He first studied film directing at Prague’s renowned FAMU cinema school, before coming back to Bratislava to study Slovak and English languages. After debuting with a collection of short stories in 1965, he became, in the 1960s and 1970s, one of the most prominent writers of the new generation in then-Czechoslovakia.
“I’ve never had the honour of experiencing easy writing. It’s always been a pure grind to me”, he admitted once, but went on to win numerous literary awards throughout his prolific career, including two Anasoft Litera prizes for contemporary literature, the most prestigious in Slovakia. One of the most translated Slovak authors particularly known for his scathing use of irony and parody, his most famous works include Escalation of Feeling (Eskalacia citu, 1989) and Fleeting Snow (Letmy sneh, 2014). He also translated many novels of prominent authors such as Joseph Conrad, Malcolm Lowry, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Wolf or William Faulkner into Slovak.
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