„Strenuously Fabricated Stories“: Double Mystification in Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s Prose.
Jiří K... more „Strenuously Fabricated Stories“: Double Mystification in Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s Prose.
Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s mystificatory lifestyle is very well known: various details from his life are now doubtful due to his tendency to show an artificial, not quite true picture of himself. Consequently, we can’t be sure about e. g. his date of birth, his aristocratic background, or his relationship with the „Viennese friend“ whose identity is still completely obscure.
Playing with reality, dislike for the usual idea of truth in literature, and systematized glorification of fiction („lie“) are significant for both Karásek’s poetry and prose. Several of his prose texts published between 1900 and 1908 illustrate this concept or actually construct an unusual connection between a text that doesn’t pretend to be mimetic („true“) and a reader who has to accept that the story he is reading „does not contain anything but follies“. Two of those texts are preceded by prefaces that could be considered manifestos of glorified lie and mystificatory literature: „Gotická duše“ (version of 1905) and „Román Manfreda Macmillena“ (1907). There the reader can find such statements as: „In matters of art it is indispensable to lie, on one condition: there has to be a deeper sense to what is being fabricated than to mere reality.“
A perfectly successful example of mystification, though, is to be found in another Karásek‘s novel from this period, „Scarabaeus“ (1908). Contrasting with the directness of what undoubtedly is the first explicit description of a love story between two male characters in the history of Czech literature, the text hides its „true“ essence and plays with its readers up to the final pages where a double mystification is revealed: the protagonist consciously and deliberately fooled himself about almost every event in the novel, therefore the reader is also fooled, but unconsciously and by the will of the author. What seemed to be a story, a relation of events, turns out to be a stream of imagination on a quite uneventful evening. Similarities to another turn-of-the-century book that was built on this principle, Richard Beer-Hofmann‘s „Der Tod Georgs“ (1900), are yet to be explored.
„Strenuously Fabricated Stories“: Double Mystification in Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s Prose.
Jiří K... more „Strenuously Fabricated Stories“: Double Mystification in Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s Prose.
Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s mystificatory lifestyle is very well known: various details from his life are now doubtful due to his tendency to show an artificial, not quite true picture of himself. Consequently, we can’t be sure about e. g. his date of birth, his aristocratic background, or his relationship with the „Viennese friend“ whose identity is still completely obscure.
Playing with reality, dislike for the usual idea of truth in literature, and systematized glorification of fiction („lie“) are significant for both Karásek’s poetry and prose. Several of his prose texts published between 1900 and 1908 illustrate this concept or actually construct an unusual connection between a text that doesn’t pretend to be mimetic („true“) and a reader who has to accept that the story he is reading „does not contain anything but follies“. Two of those texts are preceded by prefaces that could be considered manifestos of glorified lie and mystificatory literature: „Gotická duše“ (version of 1905) and „Román Manfreda Macmillena“ (1907). There the reader can find such statements as: „In matters of art it is indispensable to lie, on one condition: there has to be a deeper sense to what is being fabricated than to mere reality.“
A perfectly successful example of mystification, though, is to be found in another Karásek‘s novel from this period, „Scarabaeus“ (1908). Contrasting with the directness of what undoubtedly is the first explicit description of a love story between two male characters in the history of Czech literature, the text hides its „true“ essence and plays with its readers up to the final pages where a double mystification is revealed: the protagonist consciously and deliberately fooled himself about almost every event in the novel, therefore the reader is also fooled, but unconsciously and by the will of the author. What seemed to be a story, a relation of events, turns out to be a stream of imagination on a quite uneventful evening. Similarities to another turn-of-the-century book that was built on this principle, Richard Beer-Hofmann‘s „Der Tod Georgs“ (1900), are yet to be explored.
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Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s mystificatory lifestyle is very well known: various details from his life are now doubtful due to his tendency to show an artificial, not quite true picture of himself. Consequently, we can’t be sure about e. g. his date of birth, his aristocratic background, or his relationship with the „Viennese friend“ whose identity is still completely obscure.
Playing with reality, dislike for the usual idea of truth in literature, and systematized glorification of fiction („lie“) are significant for both Karásek’s poetry and prose. Several of his prose texts published between 1900 and 1908 illustrate this concept or actually construct an unusual connection between a text that doesn’t pretend to be mimetic („true“) and a reader who has to accept that the story he is reading „does not contain anything but follies“. Two of those texts are preceded by prefaces that could be considered manifestos of glorified lie and mystificatory literature: „Gotická duše“ (version of 1905) and „Román Manfreda Macmillena“ (1907). There the reader can find such statements as: „In matters of art it is indispensable to lie, on one condition: there has to be a deeper sense to what is being fabricated than to mere reality.“
A perfectly successful example of mystification, though, is to be found in another Karásek‘s novel from this period, „Scarabaeus“ (1908). Contrasting with the directness of what undoubtedly is the first explicit description of a love story between two male characters in the history of Czech literature, the text hides its „true“ essence and plays with its readers up to the final pages where a double mystification is revealed: the protagonist consciously and deliberately fooled himself about almost every event in the novel, therefore the reader is also fooled, but unconsciously and by the will of the author. What seemed to be a story, a relation of events, turns out to be a stream of imagination on a quite uneventful evening. Similarities to another turn-of-the-century book that was built on this principle, Richard Beer-Hofmann‘s „Der Tod Georgs“ (1900), are yet to be explored.
Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s mystificatory lifestyle is very well known: various details from his life are now doubtful due to his tendency to show an artificial, not quite true picture of himself. Consequently, we can’t be sure about e. g. his date of birth, his aristocratic background, or his relationship with the „Viennese friend“ whose identity is still completely obscure.
Playing with reality, dislike for the usual idea of truth in literature, and systematized glorification of fiction („lie“) are significant for both Karásek’s poetry and prose. Several of his prose texts published between 1900 and 1908 illustrate this concept or actually construct an unusual connection between a text that doesn’t pretend to be mimetic („true“) and a reader who has to accept that the story he is reading „does not contain anything but follies“. Two of those texts are preceded by prefaces that could be considered manifestos of glorified lie and mystificatory literature: „Gotická duše“ (version of 1905) and „Román Manfreda Macmillena“ (1907). There the reader can find such statements as: „In matters of art it is indispensable to lie, on one condition: there has to be a deeper sense to what is being fabricated than to mere reality.“
A perfectly successful example of mystification, though, is to be found in another Karásek‘s novel from this period, „Scarabaeus“ (1908). Contrasting with the directness of what undoubtedly is the first explicit description of a love story between two male characters in the history of Czech literature, the text hides its „true“ essence and plays with its readers up to the final pages where a double mystification is revealed: the protagonist consciously and deliberately fooled himself about almost every event in the novel, therefore the reader is also fooled, but unconsciously and by the will of the author. What seemed to be a story, a relation of events, turns out to be a stream of imagination on a quite uneventful evening. Similarities to another turn-of-the-century book that was built on this principle, Richard Beer-Hofmann‘s „Der Tod Georgs“ (1900), are yet to be explored.