The page of Vášová, Alta, English Reception
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Reception
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CHARACTERISTICS OF HER WRITINGThe work of Alta Vašová can be divided by genre into prose for adults, film, television and radio scripts and a substantial part of her work is devoted to children. Right after her arrival in literature she presented herself as a significant author and the determining features of her prose became the generic variability of her stories, the tendency towards experimentation, towards model situations and prosaic detail, but also the inner pathos of a narrative. It showed in a marked way in her first book, a collection of short stories The Recording of Untruths featuring fine micro-probes into the existence of contemporary man. One could also characterize as experimental prose in model situations a book of two works, Place, Time, Cause, which records the meaningless wanderings of a group of men and women. After these two strongly experimental works she moved towards science-fiction literature in the second half of the Seventies. The novels After and In the Gardens uncovered the mechanisms of totalitarian systems through the device of description of distant robotic civilizations and „ant-like” people to demythologize the false basis of a so-called happy and problem-free tomorrow. Because of the presence of philosophical-moral questions concerning the relationship of the individual and the collective, power and totalitarian methods, the novel After, framed by self-destruction of human civilization and its rebirth, could be published in its complete, uncensored version only in 1993. In the late Eighties and in the Nineties she made attempts to find new generic and stylistic devices in order to express eternal themes of love and permanent values. In her novella The Feast of the Innocents she presents the tragic love story of a medieval robber knight's daughter and a weaver's son. The work Fly-Offs is composed of diary notations characterized by the author as „following situations that always demand the choice of a lesser evil” Its chronology is reversed: it begins in the nineties and ends in the fifties, with the death of the communist dictator J. V. Stalin. The collection of short stories Fates is composed of miniature prosaic contacts with human dreams and hopes. Included here is a somewhat longer prose - an artistic collage with Bozena - that is an original look at the less visible world of the famous Czech writer Bozena Nemcova. In the novella Tightly she applied psychological penetration to the authentic life of a dentist named Klara, as a multifunctional metaphor of “tight living”. In this prose the author formulated her position on various forms of emancipation, whether of national minorities, persecuted intellectuals, or women in Slovak society. About feminism, she said the following: “I perceived life as a whole, interwoven, male-female. I could not become a link in a false chain that ignores man, lover, and father.”
ON THE AUTHOR
Vašová is a rare phenomenon in Slovak literature. She never gave in to the mandatory socialist realism, never brought in any simplified or falsely optimistic visions of the world. From the very beginning-stubbornly and consistently - she presented sensitive projects concerned with issues of civilization, ecology, or science-fiction. There she mapped interior existential situations; discussed problems of ethics, the needs of sophisticated civilization, the mutual sensitivity and perceptions of partners; their understanding and real „reading of the soul of man”. (Eva Jenčíková)
Her charming, poetic; adventurous, fantastic and otherwise organized stories emerge as central compositional underpinning for the finely developed parts of the usually simple, “verifiable” idea. Therefore the conclusion of a story is less important than the echo, or the literary destiny of her characters and through them the newly acquired knowledge of life. That is why the age of Vašová’s readers is of lesser importance. (Viera Žemberová)
