2024-09-01 11:23:37
You cannot prepare for death, but you can take it as always present. “And for me, in this sense, the living and the dead live together,” once said the writer Daniela Hodrová, who resisted the loss of her loved ones by writing about them. An important Czech writer died on Friday, she was 78 years old.
The death was reported by Jakub Hlaváček, owner of the Malvern publishing house. A few days ago, he published the ninth of her interrelated novels called What Comes, or The Journey to Magical Hill. “We paid extra for express printing so that Mrs. Hodrová, who was in palliative care, could see the publication of the novel,” said Hlaváček.
Recipient of the State Prize for Literature, the Magnesia Litera and the Franz Kafka Prize, Daniela Hodrová not only wrote fiction, she also devoted herself to it as a literary theorist and editor of a publishing house. She did not strictly separate her scientific and artistic work. “Her studies can become the key to novels, and her novels bear clear traces of the author’s theoretical research,” stated the weekly Respekt in 1995.
Similar to Jiří Kratochvil or Michal Ajvaz, to whom she was sometimes compared, she appealed to more demanding readers. Among her best-known works were the novels Podobojí, Kukly and Theta, published in the early 1990s and together making up the Tormented City trilogy. Her protagonists are connected with the names of the evangelists Matoušková, Marková, Lukášová and Janů by the fact that they all went to school in Prague’s Vinohrady. “Hodrová was able to conjure into a novel the frantic rush of a post-apocalyptic situation, confused and indeed full of expectations,” said critic Milan Jungmann, who called the trilogy “fascinating reading” in Týden magazine.
The author herself advised readers to start with her prose The City I See from 1992. “The reader can enter the world of my novels through any of them, but the problem is that they will be understandable only to those who accept their way of perceiving the world, who in this world way,” she warned.
City as text
Hodrová used to be referred to as a postmodern author whose books are based more on structure than story. They deconstruct it more often than tell it. All of them are closely connected with Prague, or the territory on the border of Vinohrady and Žižkov.
In Daniela Hodrová’s texts, the living met the dead. | Photo: Lukáš Bíba
“Far more than anyone else in Czech literature, it is true about Hodrová that she always writes one and the same text, only externally divided into individual novels,” noted literary critic Pavel Janoušek in the Tvar magazine.
Her novels are characterized by imagery and the use of personal experiences, often incorporated into lyrical streams of words. They play with reality in a complex way, telling stories using fragments of images, memories or metaphors, which, like motifs, characters and places, return cyclically, always slightly altered.
“My novel world grows from novel to novel, there are more and more characters in it, but others have lived in it since the beginning, from the novel Podobojí,” said the author in an interview for Mladá fronta Dnes. “Behind the seeming lack of clarity, in a way intentional or conscious, is the internal interconnectedness of all these stories, the awareness of the internal unity of the stories, which are the expression of a single story – mine, all of us,” she added.
In her prose, people are metaphorically transformed into signs and text, until the result sometimes resembles a formula or a cipher, noted Hospodářské noviny. For example, in the novel Sensitive City, Hodrová conceived the metropolis as a unique kind of text that is constantly read, but also written by its inhabitants.
Dying was an essential theme for her. In her lyrics, the living met the dead, as did the real with the possible, while the past clung tenaciously to people and places in the present.
Hodrová wrote about her friends, the painter Adriena Šimotová and the poets Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová, but at the same time it was as if she was always having a conversation with herself and capturing the mood of her own mind.
She was significantly inspired by myths, more precisely by their relationship to the way people think and act. “It seems to me that at different stages in my life I go through different myths and also different fairy tales. But that probably applies to all people,” she said in an interview.
Her work conceptually closes the last novel, the ninth in the sequence, What’s Coming, or the Journey to the Magic Hill. It was published by the Malvern publishing house a few days before the author’s death. “The narrator is not enraged, but conciliatory and surrendered like never before,” reads the annotation. According to her, Hodrová honestly follows the destinies that complete her own. However, he does not forget to reflect on the events of the world, from which he is gradually moving away, from the coronavirus pandemic to the war in Ukraine.
Daniela Hodrová published her last novel just a few days before her death. | Photo: Lukáš Bíba
No offense
Daniela Hodrová was born in Prague to the family of Zdenek Hodr, an actor from the Vinohrady Theater. In her youth, she thought she would follow in his footsteps. “Theater entered my prose together with my father as one of the most important motifs,” she commented.
But she also wrote about her mother. “Sometimes secretly. In Podobojá she is Nora Kožíšková, in Kuklá Helena Syslova, the martyrdom of her dying is described there. In Komedia she is even in a photograph as a little girl. In Vvóvalávání I write about her and her illness right in the second section of the text,” Hodrová helped to decipher your characters.
After graduating from high school in 1963, the future writer worked for a while as an assistant director and dramaturgist at the Jiří Wolker Theatre. She then studied Russian studies, Bohemian studies, Roman studies and comparative literature at Charles University, after which she started working as an editor for the Odeon publishing house.
From the mid-1970s, she worked at the Institute for Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences. She was the author of several monographs, studies and translations.
She wrote from a young age, but her first work, the poetic prose Pravonín from 1971, was not published at the time. During normalization, her works circulated among people in the form of samizdat. It took two decades before it reached readers in an official way. “It was simply a fact, I didn’t feel it as a grievance. This feeling is not unique to me. Writing was essential and life-giving in itself,” said Hodrová.
In 2020, A2 magazine included her books Vyvolávání and Chhála schulení in the Czech literary canon after 1989, i.e. in the selection of the most important Czech books in the 30 years since the Velvet Revolution. Together with Milan Kundera and Václav Jamek, she is the only one who has two books on this list. “Hodrová is not one of those writers who churn out several titles every year. The long time intervals between her books testify to her aesthetic responsibility,” literary historian Vladimír Novotný once declared.
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