pimp’s wife Jarmila7 and later his mother and aunts learn German and Hungarian as befits Slovak whores. Brechár’s two aunts love reading another Czech, Quido Maria Vyskočil (1881–1969), a writer of trite, cliché-riddled verse and prose that was only rarely of more literary interest than the verse. Poldo’s father eventually dies of liver failure, a rather Slovak death, one that Johanides’s own son would, exhibiting considerable self-sacrifice, endeavour to prevent his father meeting. I do not know whether the following is – was – a common practice; when Poldo’s father dies, slices of bacon had been placed around his thighs, arms and belly to diminish the stench of decomposition. That is narrated in a combination of verisimilitude and comedy that makes for earthy morbidity – especially since it took three kg of lemons, a none too common fruit in Communist Slovakia. This history of Slovakia is told largely in a series of monologues, which conceptually does look forward to But Crime Does Punish. Like Vilikovský, Johanides does in Najsmutnejšia oravská balada break the bounds of Communist respectability – of which a passage on the physical and psychological growth of Communist bureaucrats in the 1960s and 1970s and their children’s relationship to them represent a statement on contemporaneous hypocrisy: ‘The young showed respect for their fathers and were proud of them, even though they were secretly ashamed of them’ (p. 61). The corruption of party bosses also forms a theme – but that we have already seen in the father of Slovak party-critical high literature, Alfonz Bednár (1914–1989). Johanides goes a little further in that he makes a collective farm boss not only a former member of the Hlinka Guard, but also the aryaniser of a three-storey draper’s shop, and a secret policeman who has been dismissed from the service for punching Roman Catholic priests in Ružomberok prison. Poldo is far more interested in the writings of Johannes Reuchlin, a neo-Platonist of the Cabalist mode (1455–1522) than he is in the politics of his own age. Poldo, however, considers the Renaissance a vulgar age, an age vulgarised by decorativeness – 7 Name perhaps an ironic allusion to the bandit’s beloved of the Czech K.H. Mácha’s narrative poem, who had been introduced to coitus by her beloved’s father, whom his beloved consequently kills.
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Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS511250