Vzpomínky na jednu vesnickou tancovačku – Hájíček Jiří (2015)

The setting of the seventeen stories written by the author between 1995 and 2014 is the South Bohemian countryside. Most of the stories in this collection are everyday human micro-dramas; sometimes they focus more on capturing mood and atmosphere, while other times they tell a story or record a life feeling or experience. The reader will thus discover autumn in the landscape, spring and blooming grasses, scorching summer, Christmas tales, and stories about village football. In several stories, Hájíček touches on themes he later revisited in his novels. The author intentionally does not hide a certain scent of regionality; rather, he uses it as a spice and a way to enrich universally human stories. The unpretentiousness regarding style, literary heroes, and the stories themselves, along with an intimate knowledge of rural life and the depiction of atmosphere, are the main attributes of Hájíček's writing. Returns to realism and straightforward storytelling seem to be a matter of necessity or a natural consequence arising from the themes and the very essence and mission of his prose. The short story collection Memories of a Village Dance completes the image of Jiří Hájíček as an author of village novels and thus complements his existing prose work.