The page of Johanides, Ján, English Reception
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Reception
CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS WRITINGJán Johanides is one of the most expressive personalities of the contemporary Slovak literature. His work can be divided into two periods. In the first belong the first three books written between 1963 and 1966. These works were inspired by the current philosophical and literary currents, such as existentialism (Sartre, Camus), the fashionable “nouveau roman” and the literature of the absurd, as well as the devices of surrealism. In his very first works he introduced himself as a striking author with the courage to innovate. An author who knows what it is he wants to accomplish creatively and how to achieve it. His interest is directed towards the problems of human loneliness, anxiety, fear and guilt, the penetration of the inner dimension, the revelation of the processes taking place in the interior of man in crisis. Literary critics received him positively. The literary work of the second period demonstrates the mature personality in socially important topics and problems of contemporary man.
He protests against the pollution of the environment and the amorality of denying it (Unacknowledged Crows). He deals critically with the growth of consumer society and its way of life (A Ballad of a Savings Pass Book), rejects any kind of violence and intolerance in the past as well as in the present (Elephants in Mauthausen). He reveals the psychological background, the motives and causes of human failures. concerns himself with dimensions of a person’s identity and searches for the deeper personal and social roots of amorality, fear and anxiety against the background of various tragic and bizarre events. This is particularly true of his recent literary works (The Saddest Oravian Ballad, Bridge, Crossing, The Crime of a Young Lesbian, The Noise of Blackbirds Before Sleep; Tomcat and a Cold Man, Punishing Crime), all of which met with striking success with readers and critics at home and abroad.
ON THE AUTHOR
He is not interested in the superficial levels of human personality... but precisely in that private dimension that is essentially so enormous, but little researched; human consciousness, conscience and the subconscious. (Jozef Felix)
Johanides’s bad luck is that he does not write in English, for he could have been known around the world. Slovak literature is extremely lucky that he does not. (Ivica Ruttkayová-Maderová)
To read the essays and conversations of Johanides is instructive. but mostly depressing... The judgements that Johanides pronounces systematically and with cold sincerity are not products of his soul, nor his rational thinking. They were forced on him every day by the world. This wise sceptic distrusts even his own fear and deals with it by writing. He senses the closeness of the abyss and knows that one cannot avoid it, as there is something fatal about human life. And vet again and again he writes of his knowledge of life that is truer than reality itself. (Peter Andruška)
THE AUTHOR ON HIS WORK
To speak about ones work is to begin judging oneself: The writer has to become a critic and a prosecutor of himself as an author.
(…)
I have never been a communist... I was always against any kind of dictatorship, but Europe is morally perverted from Lisbon to the Urals. And I am afraid that the darkest days are descending on Europe, it allowed to undermine the values and traditions on which it stands.
