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The page of Balla, Vladimír, English biography

Image of Balla, Vladimír
Balla, Vladimír
(1967–)

Biography

8 May 1967 Nové Zámky

Vladimír Balla, publishing under his surname Balla, belongs to the youngest generation of Slovak writers. His first short-stories appeared in 1992 in magazines, followed, in 1996, by his first book Leptokaria. The book´s fourteen (sixteen in the 2000 edition) pieces of fictionconvey a sense of deeply felt existential anxiety and fear of living in a world that is full of absurdity and outside enemies. His major topics were the in/ability to communicate and lonliness. The latter was furthermoreunderstood as providing the only space for authenticity as even the oneness inherent in an act of love is for him a mere "twosome loneliness". His second volume of fiction Outsideria (1997) also conveys a sense of essential isolation of the individual and problems of the authorial ego. His stories which explicitly refuse to tell stories are reduced to descriptions of inner states of the subject while writing is presented as a form of salvation.
Balla as a narrator does have a taste for telling a story, albeit a dramatically diminished one. He often uses his own literary experience and philosophical training - his writing is quite intertextual. His references span from ancient Greek through classical German philosophy to postmodern philosophy, from Dostoevsky through Handke to his peer and friend, the poet Peter Macsovszky. He uses sudden changes in narration and shifts between the literary and the non literary. His texts switch between the serious, the ridiculous and the the absurd, between philosophical reflections and subtle poetry. 
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