Josef Vaclav Skvorecky, writer, born September 27 1924; died January 3 2012
Josef Skvorecky, who has died aged 87, belonged to that great generation of postwar Czech writers that includes Vaclav Havel, Bohumil Hrabal, Ludvik Vaculik, Ivan Klima, Arnost Lustig and Milan Kundera.
Their novels, plays, essays and memoirs defined modern Czech Âliterature and gave the rest of the world a deeper understanding of ordinary lives under German fascism and Soviet communism, the two totalitarian systems that dominated their country for much of the 20th century.
Unique voice
Skvorecky wrote more than 40 books, including his masterpiece, The Engineer of Human Souls, which won the Canadian governor general’s award for fiction in 1984. Set in the Czech émigré community in Toronto, the novel is narrated by Skvorecky’s alter ego, the cynical, skirt-chasing, sax-playing Danny Smiricky, now a respected English professor at a Toronto university who is assailed by memories of his life and loves under fascist and communist tyrannies.
As Skvorecky’s translator, what I found most difficult to convey was his unique ability to capture how different political regimes affected the way his characters speak and write.
The core of his work is a series of seven semiautobiographical, jazz-soaked books, all but one of them narrated by Smiricky. The series begins with The Cowards, which Skvorecky wrote when he was 24, and ends with Ordinary Lives, Âwritten in 2004 and published in English in 2008.
The exception is Republic of Whores, a hilarious third-person account of Smiricky’s stint in a Czech tank battalion in the 1950s. These books — and a series of crime novels featuring the melancholic homicide detective Lieutenant Boruvka — can be read as a single, vast epic covering the most crucial and painful periods of modern Czech history, but anchored in the magically remembered town of his youth.
Epic creative journey
Skvorecky’s life spanned several radically different eras. He was born in Nachod, in northeastern Bohemia, into the liberal democracy of the first Czechoslovak republic. He grew up in Nazi-occupied Bohemia, began writing in the era of Stalinism after 1948, then consolidated his reputation as a courageous, entertaining and often controversial novelist and screenwriter in Prague during the slow thaw of the late 1950s and 1960s.
After the Russians crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, he and his wife, Zdena Salivarova, emigrated to Canada where he taught literature and film studies at the University of Toronto.
The creative freedom he found in the West gave him a new lease of life. He and his wife established a Czech-language publishing house, Â68Publishers, named after the year that Skvorecky liked to describe as the “annus mirabilis, annus horribilis” of Czech history.
Over the next two decades, with Skvorecky as her chief in-house Âeditor, and often on the edge of bankruptcy, Salivarova published work by scores of banned Czech and ÂSlovak writers, including her husband, Kundera, Havel and the Nobel prize-winning poet Jaroslav Seifert. They marketed the books to Czech readers around the world and arranged for them to be smuggled into Czechoslovakia, where they were circulated from hand to hand.
Skvorecky was prolific, with 10 collections of short Âstories, two novellas and a dozen collections of essays on politics, literature and cinema to his credit. He was also a master translator, rendering works by Hemingway and Faulkner into Czech.
Noble legacy
In 1990 Havel, then the new Czech president, awarded Skvorecky and Salivarova the county’s highest Âhonour, the Order of the White Lion.
Skvorecky was nominated for the Nobel prize in 1982, inducted into the Order of Canada in 1992 and made a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996.
He had the good fortune to be Âgenuinely popular, respected by literary critics and adored by readers from all backgrounds and many countries (his works have been translated into at least 20 languages). A private academy in Prague is named after him and he lived to see many of his stories made into popular movies and television series. —