Básně a povídky – Zábrana Jan (2021)

The present volume represents Jan Zábrana in the role of a distinctive poet and prose writer. The trio of key poetry collections, Stuck Black Icons (1965), Pages from a Diary (1968), and Self-Judgment (1968 under the title Lynching), in which Zábrana captured the feelings of uncertainty and futility in the post-February era with raw, suggestive expression, is expanded by the unfinished collection of "soliloquies" The Wall of Memories from the years 1969-1971, edited according to a manuscript found in the estate and briefly summarizing the poet's intimate, creative, and political traumas. The prose section of the volume concentrates all thirteen known Zábrana's short stories from the 1950s: eight edited by the author and five unfinished, published based on manuscripts found in 1992 and 2007. Elements of autobiographical nature, fragmentariness, mundanity, and skepticism, the documentary capture of the urban periphery environment, the effort for an unstyled record of overheard conversations, or the improvised flow of one's own thoughts bring Zábrana's "testimonial" prose closer to the works of Bohumil Hrabal, Jiří Kolář, Josef Škvorecký, and Josef Jedlička. The volume, which builds on the verification of textual sources and follows the editorial solutions of previous editions of the author's poetry and short stories from the post-1989 period, was prepared for Czech...