Fuks, Ladislav (Czech Republic)

Ladislav Fuks (1923–1994) was born in Prague into the family of a strict police officer. He studied philosophy, psychology and history of art, and this education alongside his upbringing and at the time frowned-upon homosexuality proved formative to his artistic vision. His debut novel Pan Theodor Mundstock (Mr Theodor Mundstock, 1963) established him as a distinctive and assured storyteller. After the success of his first literary work, Fuks became a full-time author. He followed with the short story collections Mí černovlasí bratři (My Black-haired Brothers, 1964) and Smrt morčete (Death of a Guinea Pig, 1969), a personal novel Variace pro temnou strunu (Variations on a Dark Chord, 1966), and his most famous work Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator, 1967). During the 1970s his psychologically-oriented prose took place in increasingly bizarre settings, such as in works Myši Natálie Mooshabrové (Of Mice and Mooshaber, 1970), Oslovení z tmy (An Address from the Dark, 1972) or Obraz Martina Blaskowitze (A Picture of Martin Blaskowitz, 1980). The last addition to the author’s prolific oeuvre is his most expansive, catastrophic novel called Vévodkyně a kuchařka (The Duchess and the Cook, 1983), set in Vienna at the end of the 19^th century.

Fuks’ work is very distinctive and idiosyncratic, characterised by complex metaphors and narratives built on details and recurring motifs. The author draws his inspiration predominantly from grim human stories that traumatised him in childhood, writing seemingly offering a way to free himself – his fiction resembles nightmares, psychological hyperbole, symbolic and metaphorical visions, albeit always with a wry distance from his material. Fuks’ novels, combining mystery, horror and the grotesque, are full of black humour and absurdist scenes and dialogues. The key themes of his work are fear, anxiety, a sense of impending doom, crime, the lawlessness of totalitarian regimes, and the main character being forced to the edges of society. In his hyperbolic mirror, the historical events, individual scenes and human characters reach a grotesquely symbolic dimension. Fuks wrote his first stories as part of the Jewish literature movement of the 1960s, allowing him to project his personal worldview onto the topics of occupation, war and the Jewish fate. His characters are usually helpless and weak individuals unable to withstand the pressures of the bleak world around them. Oscillating between illusion and reality, they yearn fervently to save themselves or escape from their grim circumstances, the only tools at their disposal are, however, their own visions. Fuks’ signature style peaks in his masterpiece Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator), a parable of violence and menaced humanity personified in the lead character, a man who succumbs to the lure of power and who himself becomes a perverse executor of evil.

‘A painter of dark and dense colours, whose internationally renowned works resemble a stroll between dream and reality’

— ČTK