105 roků samoty – Peričič Denis (2022)

The central theme of the collection of prose poems "105 Years of Solitude" by Croatian writer Denis Peričić is war, starting from the horrors of World War I and II, through the sufferings of the war conflict in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, to the ubiquitous Skulls – the Golgotha of the present. The title itself refers to the year of the collection's creation (2019), when the world commemorated the 105th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. "And it started in Ukraine, it started in Crimea, it started, as some say, in my hometown of Odessa..." – the last sentence of the book, which in 2019 could be read as Babel-like memories of a distant past, becomes the first sentence of another tragic chapter in European history in 2022, another Babel-like confusion of tongues, where reason hesitates to accept the reality of how terrifyingly history is repeating itself. The Czech edition is supplemented with a parallel Croatian-Czech text of Peričić's poem "Slatinice," whose title refers to the birthplace of the author's great-great-grandfather born in the vanished village of Deutsch Zlatnik (Slatinice near Most).