Dva – Saudek Jan (2017)

Jan Saudek's prose novelty, from 1935, is actually an old-new work. In the genre of short prose, the author opens themes he has intensely explored in his previous titles: love in every way and form, a receding childhood, an approaching death. The real and the dreamed are on the same boat. Experience colored with fiction. Fiction oxygenated by life. All of this is then stylized with a certain degree of nostalgia, like handwritten letters, like diary entries, like confessions, admissions, acknowledgments. One of the greatest Czech photographers of the second half of the twentieth century is, in his literature, essentially the same as in his artistic expression: grandiose, exaggerated, brutally explicit – but also sensitive, at times melancholic, naturally opening windows to the metaphysical dimensions of reality. The titles of his previous fictional works, as well as his first artistic monographs, resonate excellently with the poetics of his prose novelty: The Theater of Life (1980), Life, Love, Death and Other Such Trivialities (1994), Single, Married, Divorced, Widower (2000), Night Tram (2008), and Jan Saudek on the Run (2009).